The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  Stop thinking about it, he told himself; in a moment they would be in the bedroom, soon he would be holding his wife. Ingrid had moved her lips against his for a moment and he had enjoyed it; but who wouldn’t, who wouldn’t enjoy being kissed by someone they were fond of, just fond of, nothing more? He hadn’t done anything wrong. Nothing except kiss her. “Evelyn, will you go,” he said angrily, and his wife lurched away from him down the hall toward the bedroom.

  I stole a kiss, he thought, and followed, inadvertent thief.

  Behind their bedroom door, Ray undressed rapidly, anxiety mounting and mixing with his desire so that being on the verge of making love to his wife felt strangely dangerous, as if it were brand new. But Evelyn was too drunk; she flopped down on the bed in her clothes and lay there for a moment, then sighed and rolled over, asleep.

  Ray sat on the edge of the bed, his hand resting heavily on his erection. Why had Ingrid kissed him? What had she wanted? Oh, Ingrid was sixteen, for God’s sake, it didn’t matter what she thought she wanted. He shuddered and focused his eyes on his wife. Evelyn’s skirt had ridden up to expose a band of tattoos peeking out of the runs in her stockings, which had laddered all the way up her legs. What in God’s name had those two been doing? He ran a hand over Evelyn’s thigh. She didn’t stir. He threw himself down beside her, inhaled the scent of her, willing her toward the center of his pleasure, this was the woman he loved, wanted, this was his wife, he was forcing his mind to think of her and forcing himself toward an orgasm that when it came gave him only a single spasm of pleasure before changing to a heaviness that lay over him like a lead apron, through which another thought of Ingrid still managed to penetrate.

  Evelyn slept the dreamless sleep of the happily drunken; Ray dozed, uneasy, in the suburbs of guilt. Down the hall, Ingrid sat in bed awake, naked except for the fedora. Something she had never felt before tonight had slid across the pale shine of her shoulders, crossed her collarbone, touched her untouched breasts. Something had stroked her dropped jaw, slipped inside her lips and down her throat, only to discover that her heart had come open. Like the zipper on a dress. Like a lock being picked. How? Evelyn’s mouth, pressed against Ingrid’s astonished own.

  14.

  Ray woke in the morning to find the sun too far up in the sky. He rolled over and looked at the clock: was it really eight-thirty? He should have been walking into work an hour ago. This very minute he was supposed to be walking up the steps to Boston City Hall for a presentation to the zoning board. He hurried into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. At the edge of his awareness he knew that in addition to being late something else was wrong too, but he was not yet conscious of what it was. He hastily brushed his teeth and when he spit, he met his own eyes in the mirror and his mind awoke to the real problem.

  Ingrid, her hair smelling of stale cigarette, girl sweat; her flutey metallic voice, her sideways smiles; Ingrid, her dirty-fingered hands pounding typewriter keys, her soft bony body leaning against him while piano music unfolded through the summer air. Last night he’d kissed her.

  Kiss her, his drunken wife had said, and he, fully sober, had done it.

  Kiss her goodnight, Ray. Oh, what had Evelyn been thinking?

  He was going to be horribly late for the zoning board appearance. He dressed and ran out the door without showering, without breakfast. Sat in traffic on 128, fingers drumming the wheel. Kiss her goodnight. He would never have done it if his wife hadn’t told him to. Not that that was an excuse. He was going to miss the zoning meeting entirely; they would have to present without him. And Ingrid had kissed him back; what did that mean? It didn’t mean anything; she was a drunken sixteen-year-old. Perhaps she had a little crush on him? If Dunlap found out he’d missed the meeting, there would be serious hell. There was no excuse for Evelyn’s getting drunk with Ingrid, none at all. He would have to talk to Evelyn tonight.

  It was going to be a difficult day; he could feel it in the heat of the sun on his windshield as he sat on the freeway, not moving.

  Ingrid woke next.

  Her head ached and her stomach was jumping, twitching in bright, regular beats. She rolled over and saw hanging on the bedpost the fedora Ray had given her the night before. She reached up and settled it on her head. Whoever had sapped me knew his job. My head felt like it had spent the night in a vise. I poured myself a double rye and after I drank it I began to feel halfway human again and that half of me wanted breakfast and a shave and lots and lots of scaldingly hot coffee.

  She got out of bed and took Ray’s old trench coat from her closet and slid into it, stuck a cigarette in her mouth, and studied herself in the mirror. She was pleased with what she saw: the hat helped a lot. Then she went into the fainting room and sat down at the typewriter.

  The guy in Emily Roseine’s living room was tall, with a fedora pulled down low. I couldn’t see his face from my hiding place in the shrubbery, but Emily Roseine could, and she seemed to be liking it. She showed him the rock, the one that had come flying through the window with the note wrapped around it. The note asking for the secret formula, X-onium, in exchange for her husband’s safe return.

  And then a weird thing happened. He kissed her. The kissing meant I couldn’t see her face anymore, but what her hands were doing on his back made me think she liked kissing him too. I didn’t like it much at all, but nobody was asking me. So I just knelt there and watched them kiss on the other side of that big broken picture window, and then they both went up the staircase.

  I walked back to my car with gravel stuck to my knees.

  Ingrid pushed the chair back from the desk. Her heart was beating so hard her hands were shaking. Evelyn’s kiss had turned her stomach into a Geiger counter, the needle jumping wildly all over the gauge of her insides. What radioactive hell was this? There was no science for it, no mapping. She stood in the door of the fainting room and looked down the hall toward the master bedroom. She could feel Evelyn’s presence in there, asleep but pulling at her like a magnet. Urging, Go toward her. Get closer.

  But how? Ingrid went back to her bedroom, removed the hat and coat, pulled on a pair of cutoffs and a tee shirt. Gave Melvin his mealworms. Don’t think about kissing her. She went downstairs. Coffee, think about getting coffee, but once in the kitchen, she grabbed her sneakers and kept going, out the back door and around the side of the house to her bike. Hopped on and pedaled hard down Old Adams Road and out toward the Post Road, heading east. Making distance between herself and the scene of the crime.

  Evelyn woke at noon. Still dressed, face greasy. She had fallen asleep with her contact lenses in, and her eyes hurt. She wiped her cheek and smelled tomatoes and the night came back to her, that crazy stuff with the chicken. She sat up, pulled off her ruined stockings. She hadn’t been drunk like that in years. Around Joe she had always stayed sober, keeping sharp to field whatever he threw at her. But last night—the drunken walk with Ingrid, the champagne, the laughing—it was lovely. She and Ingrid laughing together was lovely. How long had it been since she’d had that kind of girlfriend fun?

  She climbed into the shower and considered. She and Alice Marie had used have a good time together once in a while. But she hadn’t talked to Alice Marie in almost a year, hadn’t seen her in close to two, not since she left Virginia with Joe’s ashes. Had she ever had fun with Ray like she’d had with Ingrid last night? Perhaps once, a winter evening just after they were married. The Charles River had frozen hard enough for skating, and they’d gone out on the ice. That night, perhaps. Well, that was something. She and Joe had never had fun that way, of that she was sure.

  Where was the ghost of Joe Cullen this morning? Evelyn looked down at her body, dripping on the bathmat. Stars and flags and bluebirds, the sun and the mermaid. The feel of Joe’s hands, never steadier than when he was working, was still all over her. Marking her as different forever. There and there and there.

  It’s amazing I’m here at all, she thought. Both here in this house and here alive. That’s the
real feat.

  She met Joe in the wake of her adolescent fall from the high wire. After being discharged from the hospital with a cast on each leg and a bottle of pain medication nowhere near as strong as what she’d had in the ward, Evie had been left on her back in the trailer with instructions not to move unless necessary. The feeling around the circus lot was that her luck at being alive and not paralyzed was exceeded only by her stupidity. What she’d done was inexcusable, the kind of thing a townie would sneak in and try. She was in disgrace. Except for the circus tutor who brought her homework, no one came to see her.

  She lay in the trailer lost in the ache of misery and her own body. Each inhalation radiated dull stabs of pain along her broken ribs; the casts on her legs itched her. The pills she’d been given didn’t work. Then someone stood in the aluminum door frame, blocking the light; without her glasses, she couldn’t tell who.

  “Evie?” said a resonant, male voice she recognized but could not place.

  “Come in,” she said, and the shape came in, bulky in the blur of crowded space. Now that he was within her range of half-clear vision, Evie saw it was the new roustabout, the good-looking one with the tattoos. He stood awkwardly just inside the screen door and offered her a paper circus cup, which turned out to be filled with grape soda. She disliked grape but drank it gratefully: she was lonely and thirsty.

  Joe stayed only a few minutes that first day. After he had gone, Evie occupied herself with those minutes for the next several hours. She recalled what she knew of him from circus gossip: He had been in the war but didn’t have any medals. He had learned the art of tattooing while stationed somewhere overseas. He had done a stint as a roustabout for a sideshow in Texas, where he had learned to swallow swords. She had seen him herself, out behind his trailer, lifting dumbbells he had made from a steel pole he’d stuck into cement-filled coffee cans.

  Joe came back to see her the following afternoon. This time he brought bringing a whole bottle of Ne-Hi orange and a paper cup full of ice which she let him run up and down the back of her neck. No boy had ever paid her so much attention. She asked him about his tattoos, about the way they were made. Then she asked if he wouldn’t mind giving her one.

  “You’re a girl,” Joe said.

  “Please,” Evie said. “It will take my mind off the itching in my casts. Come on, just a little one.”

  “The casts itch?”

  Evie nodded.

  “Well, sorry, but no. Your father would kill me.”

  “He won’t see it,” Evie answered daringly. Joe raised his eyebrows, then grinned at her. She smiled back, and in that brief exchange of happiness, much was decided.

  He returned that evening, bringing his tattoo equipment. It was during the evening show, when Evie’s father and mother and sister were busy riding bicycles in midair. Evie was alone in the trailer, freckles burning with excitement.

  She gave Joe her left hip, on the belly side of the bone, just below the band of her underwear, a spot chosen because privacy was so scarce in the trailer that the artwork could only be hidden by her underwear.

  Joe, in return, gave Evie a tiny bluebird, wings outstretched, a small red heart held in its beak. The pain was intense. While he was inking her, she could think of nothing else but how it hurt.

  He was professional, didn’t crack jokes or try to feel her up, but bent over her body frowning, steadying his forearm against her thigh. When it was over he left, just before her parents came down off the wire. Evie fell back on the tiny day sofa, her finger resting lightly on the spot where, beneath her pajamas, beneath the bandage, there was a bright blaze of color that proved someone was interested in her, that someone thought she was interesting. All this where nothing had been before.

  A week later Joe gave her an orange and yellow butterfly on her other hip. She let him kiss her, on the lips only. Like the tattoos, the kiss was all the more zinging, stinging and delicious for having to be kept hidden.

  Evie had been listening to barkers work the crowds with promises since before she could talk, but at age sixteen she still had not learned that few seductions yield the product advertised. Joe shared with her a love of color, the label of outcast, and, as it turned out in the end, a talent for accidents. But that came years later. For now there was the seduction and the absolute distraction of the needle that Joe dragged expertly over her flesh, creating a pain so intense and specific that she could feel no other. And there was the discovery of sex. In those early years before Joe began drinking so heavily, sex drugged her with pleasure endorphins just as the needle did with endorphins of pain.

  In the army Joe Cullen had learned to box and play poker, a combination that eventually earned him a dishonorable discharge for knocking out a superior officer’s front teeth during a fight over cards. Back in civilian clothes with no money and his forearms full of tattoos, he drifted to Texas and joined the Bob Beaufort Traveling Freak Show as a roustabout and driver. It was there he learned to swallow knives, swords and umbrellas, and there that he perfected his gambling skills. Playing pinochle with the Human Canvas he won his tattoo equipment; playing Guillotine with the Human Torch, he picked up the equivalent of two months’ wages. Playing poker with Mr. Bob Beaufort himself, he won the boss’s Camaro and paid for the privilege with his job. He left Texas and worked his way east along the Gulf Coast, doing odd jobs and giving tattoos to sailors, until he finally signed on as a roustabout for the Jones and Wallace Big Top. A few months later he fell for the younger daughter of the circus’s high wire stars and convinced the stage manager to let him perform his sword swallowing act in the slot between second clowns and trapeze. Evie, in a spangled leotard not unlike the one Alice Marie wore on the high wire, stood under the spotlight beside Joe and passed him his props. A year and a half later he married Eve Lynne Mott the day after her eighteenth birthday. He was twenty-six years old.

  With the marriage, Evelyn was out of her parents’ trailer, and when she went, her parents, who didn’t like Joe, stopped treating her as someone they had a particular responsibility for, or investment in. When they talked to her it was about the coming weather, or details of the show, or the truck engine. They never asked how she was, or how Joe was, or if she needed anything at all. It would have bothered Evie more except that she’d finally achieved the status she’d so long wished for—she was a performer at last. As low on the totem pole as First of May clowns, to be sure, but she was part of Joe’s act, she was actually working in the ring now. And that, coupled with her rapidly spreading tattoos, seemed to raise her in the eyes of the other performers, her immediate family excepted.

  At first her marriage to Joe was not bad; he did things she’d never dared to—talk back to the boss, kiss in public, give up on her parents. She gave up on going to lessons in the classroom trailer as well—“You aren’t going to learn anything worth knowing sitting on your ass at a desk,” Joe said, and in lieu of the social studies hour he took her to the track and showed her how to bet on horses. She won fifty dollars on a long shot and never went back to class, leaving her twelfth grade year unfinished. When she was with Joe she didn’t care; people looked at her as if she were someone to be reckoned with now, and her proximity to a man with a volatile temper made them more careful about what they said to her as well.

  But after the first year of marriage, the next five slid downhill as fast as Joe himself: beer by beer and card game by card game, Joe became a drunk. By the time Evelyn was twenty-three, they were arguing every night. Joe was getting into fights with the other performers and once pulled out one of the swords from his act and threatened to kill the ringmaster, who had beaten him at cards. When he got this bad, someone—usually the roustabout they called Tall Shale—would lock Joe and his fists in an empty animal cage until he sobered up, after which he would swear off drinking until the next payday. Had he not been married to the daughter of the biggest act Jones and Wallace had, he would have been fired. But he was, and without him, Evelyn felt, she would go back to being nothing
. Better to be a someone with an occasional black eye or broken rib than no one at all.

  Evelyn had stayed in the shower so long that the water was cold. She shut it off, dried her hair and dressed. Maybe this morning she and Ingrid could drive over to that little diner in Waltham, the Hideaway, and have a real road breakfast, greasy eggs and burnt bacon. Charred food ’s the best thing for a hangover, the ghost of Joe Cullen reminded her.

  But when Evelyn went looking for Ingrid, she found only an empty bedroom, an empty fainting room, an empty backyard. Ingrid’s bicycle was gone. Evelyn stood in back door and felt lost. What was she supposed to do all by herself in this huge house? Knock around alone all day while Ray was at work, or clean things that weren’t even dirty. She turned to look at the kitchen behind her. In fact the kitchen was dirty; no one had cleaned up after dinner and the remains of the chicken had been left out all night. She fed the sauce to the disposal and dumped the bones in the garbage pail. And then, for no reason at all that she could see, she started to cry.

  It took Ingrid an hour to bike into Harvard Square. She’d wanted to go far enough that she would be exhausted, and perhaps convince the Geiger counter in her chest to stop detecting danger everywhere.