The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  “Who was that I saw you kissing the other night after I left?” I asked her. “Because it was a hell of a display of affection for a married lady. Unless, of course, that was your husband, in which case he hasn’t been kidnapped after all.”

  It was a bad play on my part: it just made her mad. So I didn’t learn anything except that she was even better looking when she was angry.

  “You sneak,” she said. “What were you doing, spying on me?”

  “I didn’t ask you to give me some phony story about how your husband’s missing and then you get a ransom note thrown through your window that it turns out you wrote yourself.”

  She went white around the nose. “You’re a liar, Mr. Slade. And I thought detectives were supposed to be after the truth.”

  “Don’t push me,” I said. “What I’m after I usually get.”

  “What I’m after I always get,” she breathed. Then she pressed up against me, jamming my gun into my gut like a broken promise.

  Ray looked up.

  “That’s as far as I got,” Ingrid said. “What kind of gun does our detective have?”

  She wore her Dead Kennedys T-shirt and what looked like a pair of men’s boxer shorts with skulls on them. The rest of her was skin. He wanted to touch it, just run his hand lightly over her forearm. He tried to squash the thought. What had she asked him? Gun.

  “Whatever kind you want. A Colt? A Luger?”

  “Which is better?”

  Ray shook his head, amused. Did she really think he could answer the question with any knowledge at all? Was she confusing him with his own fictional hero from long ago? He liked the idea, then felt embarrassed at the conceit.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Well, what kind would you have if you had one?”

  “I wouldn’t have one,” he said. “I might have had a b.b. gun when I was a kid, but that’s the extent of my gun knowledge. My dad didn’t hunt, and I wasn’t in Vietnam. Why can’t you just call it ‘gun’?”

  It was not that it was smooth adolescent skin that made him want to touch it. It was that it was her skin: it held everything that was Ingrid inside of it, a rare and precious envelope with dirty knees. He made himself look at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster near the crown molding.

  “But what should I write next?” Ingrid asked.

  He looked back at Ingrid, tried to focus on what she’d just asked him.

  “You mean, after ‘jamming my gun in my gut like a broken promise?’ Come on, you know the genre. The detective has to push the femme fatale off him and leave. He goes and has a stiff drink to calm down, and then he calls up his buddy who works in homicide and can go through all the old police files for him to see if she has a rap sheet.”

  Ingrid frowned. “I think it would be better if the detective just kisses her.”

  The papers in Ray’s hand gave an involuntary shake. He put them down on the desk and looked very hard at the floor. Was she speaking to him in code, did she want him to kiss her? Ingrid had twisted one leg around the other, and was slouched against the desk picking a cuticle. Not a particularly suggestive pose. But there was her body, her swimmy mouth, her greenish-black hair with its inch-long sandy roots, and a kind of weight about her, a weight radiating off her like heat, a weight that settled on him like the pressure of an actual body against his, and in a way that made him want to push back, not to push away, but to offer weight in return, as if they were dancing.

  “Ingrid, I really need to get back to my work.”

  “You could help me with this and then I could help you type your stuff.”

  “There won’t be anything to type if I don’t write it first. Now scoot.”

  “Don’t you want to just help me with the dialogue for a few minutes?”

  “NO,” he said, almost yelling it.

  “All right, fine. You’re in a fabulous mood this evening.” She grabbed the papers and went out, slamming the door behind her.

  Immediately Ray was filled with remorse, a deep stab of it that opened such confusion of feeling that for a moment he could do nothing but sit there with something enormous and painful trying to break through cage of his chest.

  Was it rage, was it lust? No, neither. He did not know what it was. What was wrong with him?

  Now Evelyn was standing in the doorway saying something about the car, I can drop you at the train in the morning and take your car that way she was saying. What, he said, and, do we have to talk about this now? She was talking and he was just watching her mouth move, the words all secondary, the garage in Randall better than the one in Newell in her opinion and why did she keep talking at him?

  He held up an hand in protest.

  “Is it too much to ask that I can work in peace for an hour? I can’t get anything done at all when I’m constantly being interrupted.” He stood up, clutching his papers, and went past her out of the study.

  By the time he’d gone the few steps to the top of the stairs he was sorry. Storming out of the room was just childish. He had let himself lose focus: he had an unfinished manuscript and a broken window that needed his attention; these were concrete things that could be made better simply by turning his mind to the problems they posed. Why all this angst over a ridiculous crush on a teenager? If some other man his age, Alex Yeager, say, had jerked off to the image of some teenage girl he’d seen on the subway, he wouldn’t give it a second thought. So what was his problem? Ingrid was a girl who’d come into his life at an odd moment, and next month she would go out of it again and that would be that. His worrying over his feelings for her was probably just an artful bit of procrastination. Well, that would end right now. He would go back to his desk and continue on with Victorian Architecture. But first he needed to apologize to his wife.

  Evelyn was lying on the bed in her bathrobe reading Family Circle.

  “Sweetheart,” Ray said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. That wasn’t like me at all.”

  “No,” she said, “it wasn’t like you.” She did not seem angry or hurt so much as curious.

  He leaned over the bed and kissed Evelyn’s cheek, breathed in the perfume of her hair.

  “I guess Marseille was right,” Evelyn said.

  “About what?”

  “When we went to lunch, she asked me how you were holding up under all the changes that were happening at work. She said Alex was a wreck from it. I had to say you were fine, since you hadn’t told me any different, but maybe you’re not. What changes?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray said. “Maybe Marseille thinks Alex and I are working on the same job—he’s got a big deadline coming up. And of course, the entire firm is sliding downhill by every possible aesthetic criterion, but there’s nothing specific in the air. At least, not as far as I know. I’ll have to ask Alex what she meant.”

  He kissed her again and felt a tiny and blessed relief from the pressure that had been building up in him like steam.

  “Am I forgiven?” he asked.

  “Of course you are.”

  Of course I am, he thought; Evelyn had come from a husband who gave her black eyes; this was only a man raising his voice a little in exasperation. She wouldn’t guess anything was wrong, would never guess his feelings for Ingrid. She had blamed his bad mood on work without his needing to search for an excuse even. He felt a rush of generosity toward her.

  “Let’s take a walk up to the ridge,” he said on impulse.

  “Now? I’m in my robe.”

  “Throw on some jeans. Come on, the stars are coming out.”

  She shook her head. “Take Ingrid.”

  He froze, forced himself to relax again. “Come on—” he put his arm around Evelyn’s waist.

  “Stop—you smell like whiskey.”

  “I’ve had one drink. Let’s take a walk, is all I’m asking. Just you and me.”

  “Not now,” she said firmly.

  He ran his hands up and down her arms. Her arms looked soft, a little fleshy unti
l you pressed on them and felt the hard knots of muscle underneath. He buried his face in her hair again and breathed in, inhaling her scent, feeling the warmth of her hair against his face. The warmth spread down through his throat like more bourbon, down through his belly and into his cock. “I love you,” he said.

  He kissed her hair, her forehead, her temple, her ear—and then he felt it. A kind of vibration inside him, like the hum of an oncoming train. Something coming toward him at great speed, something wrong. And then it was flying past him so close that he stepped back from his wife to avoid being hit by it: dark, sharp head of hair, skinny arms, earlobe with safety pin, invading his body and brain. Filling it with longing for stale smoke and fresh tobacco, cut off shorts and dirty knees. Oh, hell. He wrapped his arms around Evelyn and clung to her.

  Oh, save me from being crushed by the wheels of this train—

  “I love you, too,” Evelyn answered, and disentangled herself from his arms.

  He went out of the bedroom and back to the study, cursing himself for having left it in the first place. He would type up his new chapter himself, right now. He would stop letting Ingrid take dictation. If she complained, he would give her yard work to do instead.

  He opened the desk drawer and saw that the new box of typing paper he’d just put there had disappeared. Ingrid must have taken it into the fainting room without leaving him a single sheet. So he got up again and went into the fainting room, and yes, there was his paper, and beside it a saucer with a cigarette butt in it, and a pencil with teeth marks in the yellow.

  As he looked at these two slightly unpleasant objects he was aware of seeing not their distasteful aspects—the marred pencil, the nasty smoking habit—but their intimacy. Ingrid had chewed on this pencil because she was not supposed to smoke indoors, and then she had given up and smoked anyway because it made her feel better. Her body oddly graceful inside clothes that had been chosen to look as ill-fitting and unflattering as possible and he was thinking about her in the wrong way again, he was losing his balance, he was going to fall.

  To get something, anything, into his mind instead, Ray leaned over the desk and read what she had left in the typewriter carriage.

  She pressed up against me, jamming my gun into my gut like a broken promise. I had a reputation to uphold. But I also had a soft warm body pressing up against me, so close I could count the freckles on her nose. Mister, what would you have done in my place? Damn straight you would. I took her in my arms and kissed her. She didn’t taste of blackmail or murder. She tasted of fresh peaches and lipstick, the kind that comes off on your tie.

  Ray straightened up and breathed desire, tension, relief. Mister, what would you have done in my place? If this were a situation happening to him with some other girl, and if Ingrid were looking on from the outside, she wouldn’t judge him or hate him. She would understand he hadn’t meant for it to happen.

  And as long as he never acted on his feelings for her, it wouldn’t make him a bad man.

  17.

  “I’m telling you, there is still something wrong with that transmission,” Evelyn said. It was Thursday night and Ray had come home to find both Evelyn and Ingrid sitting at the kitchen table playing cards. Ingrid was wearing the fedora he had given her, its brim pulled down over one eye. “The air conditioner works now, but the transmission’s still slipping.”

  “They probably didn’t add enough fluid back in after they flushed it,” Ray said. He tried not to look at Ingrid, Ingrid wearing his hat. “Better take the car back in tomorrow.”

  “But tomorrow we’re supposed to go to Paragon Park,” Ingrid said.

  Evelyn looked up from her cards. “We can go Saturday instead. I don’t want to break down on the Southeast Expressway.”

  “But we were going to go tomorrow.” Ingrid looked from Evelyn to Ray and back at Evelyn. “The transmission seems fine to me.”

  “How do you know? You aren’t driving it. And didn’t you see me trying to get it into reverse yesterday? It took three tries.”

  Ray said, “Did you have the garage check the fluid level after they flushed it?”

  “I didn’t tell them specifically to check it—isn’t that their job?”

  “You can’t assume anything,” Ray said. “I’ll bet they didn’t check it and the fluid is just low.”

  “We have to go to Paragon Park tomorrow,” Ingrid said. “I’ve been waiting for it all week.”

  Both adults looked at her. It was unlike Ingrid to insist that she wanted something.

  “Well, then, you can take the Saab” said Ray. “I’ll go get fluid for the Olds tonight and then drive it tomorrow and see how it handles.” He smiled at them, pleased. This would make his wife happy, it would make Ingrid happy, and—the thought rose unbidden—Ingrid would see he was generous, and handy.

  “It’s an awesome car,” Ingrid said.

  “The Saab, you mean?”

  “The Olds.”

  “That clunky thing? It’s about eighteen feet long and handles like a tank.”

  “I know. But it’s perfect. Arthur Slade has one just like it.”

  “Ah,” said Ray.

  Evelyn threw down a pair of Kings. “If you’re going to get the transmission fluid tonight, you better go, Ray. That gas station closes at eight.”

  “I’m going, I’m going,” he said. “I can see where I’m not wanted.”

  Ingrid looked up. “Would you pick me up some more cigarettes while you’re there?”

  “I would not.”

  “Please? You know I’m going to get them anyway.”

  “I will not be the instrument of your ruin, young lady,” he said in mock sternness. But if he wasn’t careful, she would be the instrument of his.

  Ray left the kitchen without saying anything else and went out the front door. He was glad to be out of the house. Perhaps the fresh air would clear his head.

  “So can I drive?” Ingrid asked Evelyn.

  They were in the Oldsmobile, heading toward the amusement park in Friday traffic.

  “You want to drive this car? On the freeway?”

  “No, when we get off in Nantasket. In an empty part of the parking lot or something. I’ve driven before—my dad was teaching me last summer.”

  Evelyn hesitated. But why not let her try it? She’d been driving for two years when she was Ingrid’s age. Besides, driving was something she was good at. She could teach Ingrid. It would be fun.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll give you a driving lesson.”

  Darling, Ingrid thought. Give me the keys.

  Paragon Park, the Tilt-a-Whirl: Evelyn’s body slamming against hers, driving them both into the side of the spinning car, Ingrid slightly sick at her stomach from a combination of desire and the ride. Then the roller coaster, the drop, Evelyn’s nails digging into her thigh as the two of them screamed at the top of their lungs. Was that what fucking was like, Ingrid thought, the simultaneity of the rush, the stomach drop, the feel of her grabbing you?

  Then the ride was over and they were on the ground again, but there was no ground again for Ingrid because the feeling of her stomach in her mouth stayed with her. She was so quiet that Evelyn asked her if she was all right.

  “Too much cotton candy, I guess.”

  “Or hotdogs, or was it the Slushie?” Evelyn laughed. Her laugh made the color of a cherry Slushie rise to Ingrid’s forehead and cheeks. She put her arm around Ingrid’s shoulder. “My stomach’s made of iron,” Evelyn went on, attributing the flushed, look on Ingrid’s face to consequences of diet, “but I shouldn’t have let you eat all that. Want me to buy you a seltzer?”

  “I’m okay,” Ingrid said.

  “Let’s do the arcade then.”

  They tried pinball and Skee-ball and PacMan and Space Invaders, they played a round of miniature golf. They went across the road to the boardwalk and the beach, took off their shoes and stood in the lappy little waves. Evelyn let Ingrid drive the Olds first in the parking lot and then down the road to a
clam shack, where they ate fried clams and greasy onion rings. They drove back to the lot and went into the midway, where Evelyn explained how the Guess your Weight game was rigged. Ingrid watched Evelyn ace the ring toss, winning a glass beer mug with a picture of the roller coaster on it. As the last ring flew onto the spike and the carny rang a bell, Ingrid allowed herself to throw her arms around Evelyn and hug, figuring it was safe to do under cover of congratulations. It was the kind of thing she saw other girls do with their friends but had never done herself. And Evelyn hugged her back, jumping up and down in her lime green espadrilles. Ingrid, awash in the scent of Evelyn’s beachy smelling skin, felt herself back on the rides, her stomach lodged firmly in her mouth, her whole body spinning, the world upside-down.

  That night she couldn’t sleep. She had her Westinghouse fan going full force, but the heat that kept her awake was something whose origins lay inside her. When at last she dropped off, it was down into a dream of Evelyn pressing against her even after the ride had stopped, a dream of mouths and breasts and skin. She awoke tangled in sheets wet with sweat, went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face but the dream clung like stale perfume, Mister.

  She considered taking the Underwood down into the fallout shelter, where it was always cool, and rejected the idea; she needed the battered desk, her Westinghouse fan with the dangerous blades, the Venetian blind of the fainting room; even the grimy heat could work in her favor, she supposed; the words had to come out of the atmosphere. That was what she had tried to explain to Ray when he asked how she did it.

  She pressed up against me and her perfume made me as dizzy as a blonde at a roulette table with all the chips on red

  Ingrid jacked the paper out of the typewriter carriage in disgust, crumpled it into a snowball and tried again.

  She pressed up against me, and her perfume made me as dizzy as a prize fighter who’s just been thrown over the ropes at the fights

  This paper, too, was yanked out and sent flying across the room against the wall to join the other drifts on the floor.