The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  She pressed up against me and her perfuje

  Ingrid pushed back her chair.

  Mister, I need a cup of strong coffee with an even stronger shot of bourbon in it. I need a cigarette that doesn’t taste like poison. I need a clue. I need a lot of things I don’t have.

  18.

  The dream of Evelyn’s body against hers made Ingrid avoid Evelyn all the next day. How could Evelyn look at her and not know? Now she was alone; Evelyn had gone off on errands, and Ray had spent the morning with his nose in a book. When she asked, he told her he was busy figuring out how to repair the broken window, and no, he did not need any help.

  Feeling a little lost, Ingrid took Melvin and her cigarettes and The Boston Globe out to the back yard where she sat in Evelyn’s lawn chair smoked and read “REAGAN CHOOSES KISSINGER TO HEAD NEW LATIN TEAM” until she heard the phone ring and raced into the kitchen to get it. What if it was Evelyn, calling to say, Get on your bike and meet me in Waltham, I’m taking you to an air-conditioned movie, I have to see you right now.

  “Shepard residence,” Ingrid said. She liked saying this because it came out in her tough voice without her even trying.

  “Ingrid?” A man’s voice on the line.

  Where do I know that voice from, Ingrid thought for a split second, even as she was recognizing it, out of place in the Shepards’ kitchen.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. And then, because he never called her, “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine, sweetie. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, everything’s fine. I’m having a good summer.”

  “Good, good.” Another pause. Her father cleared his throat, a handful of gravel disappearing into a still pond; the silence resumed.

  This, thought Ingrid, is what I had to leave Melvin to escape from. Slow death by pauses. It was worse than Chinese water torture, suburban pause torture. She wandered into the living room, trailing the long extension cord behind her.

  “That summer job of yours working out all right?” her father asked.

  “It’s working out great, Dad,” she said, not bothering to tell her father that Ray hadn’t given her anything to type in almost a week. The guy I work for, Ray, and Evelyn, that’s his wife, they’re both—they’re really nice,” she finished lamely.

  “Good,” her father repeated. And then, on the far side of another pause: “Ingrid, I have some news.”

  Ingrid felt her stomach turn over, the way it always had when her father said things like “I have some news,” because a part of her was still pretty sure that if there had been a nuclear accident, her father would announce it to her in just this way.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Well.” Her father coughed, a small, embarrassed clearing-my-throat kind of cough. “Well. Linda and I are getting married.”

  Kapow. Ingrid sat down on the floor, felt her breath leave her all at once. I woke up with a mouthful of gravel and tire prints across my chest. Mister, I should have seen it coming. The size of a semi and nothing else on the road.

  “Ingrid?”

  “Yeah. Congratulations,” she said. Not feeling much of anything at all.

  “Thank you.” Her father sounded happy, almost shy. “The wedding will be the last week in August,” he went on, “and we want you to be a bridesmaid.”

  Then the guy who had worked me over took another swing. I felt the Mack truck drive over me again.

  “A bridesmaid?” she repeated.

  “You and Melanie. We’ll have it at the Highlands Club, that’s the place attached to the golf course over where the Mitchells live. You remember it.”

  This was bad. Think, Slade, think. Make some conditions. Ingrid shook her head from side to side, as if a useful thought might fly out of it. She could tell him she’d go to the wedding but she wouldn’t be a bridesmaid. She could tell him she’d be a bridesmaid but she wouldn’t wear a dress. She’d could tell him she would stay for 24 hours only. Leave here Friday night, go to the wedding on Saturday, catch a red-eye back and land in Boston Sunday morning. Evelyn could pick her up at the airport.

  And here Ingrid entered into a dream of Evelyn alone at the arrival gate, Ray conveniently off parking the car, so that it was Evelyn she hugged and then they were kissing, mouths mashed together sweet and wet in an exponential version of the good night kiss Evelyn had given her the night of the chicken grease.

  “And guess what, sweetie?” her father continued. “Now that we’ll be a real family, we want you to come back to Melvin. To live.”

  “What?” Ingrid startled awake. “What?”

  “We’re buying a house right down the street from our old one that will be big enough for the four of us to live. You can start the fall semester of school here, and... and you’ll be home again with me, with us.”

  “I can’t,” Ingrid said.

  Her father went on as if he hadn’t heard her, which he hadn’t. “You and Melanie will each have your own rooms, of course, and you can start at the high school in the fall. Lots of kids start there in their junior years, so you’ll fit right in—”

  “Dad!”

  “What?”

  “I can’t come back.”

  “What, sweetie?”

  “I’m not coming back to Melvin. I can’t. I just—I can’t.” Her throat constricted.

  Her father didn’t reply. Ingrid could visualize perfectly the expression he sometimes got, utter bewilderment as if she had suddenly begun speaking Chinese, or turned into a frog. A situation he’d never considered and therefore couldn’t comprehend. The nuclear reactor melting down after all.

  “I can’t go back to Melvin, Dad,” she said again.

  “What do you mean, ‘can’t’?”

  “Can’t, Dad. Can Not. I can’t leave Evelyn and Ray, and I can’t go back to Melvin. I’ll die, literally.” What would her father understand? “I have a job here,” she said, “I can’t just leave any old time. We’re writing a book, I mean Ray is writing it and he’s hired me to help him until it’s finished. And Evelyn, his wife, we’re really good friends now and—I can’t just pick up and leave.”

  “Woah, Ingrid, slow down. I thought you were an au pair for an architect and his family. Who’s this writer? Where are you living?”

  “Dad, Ray is the architect. He’s writing a book. I can’t leave here, Daddy, I—I’ve signed a contract,” she said desperately. “To work for them, I—”

  “Ingrid, come on. No one is saying you have to leave tomorrow. And this is a summer job, not a career with a pension. But you can give them two weeks’ notice if you want. I made you a reservation for the 7th, but I suppose I could change your ticket to a few days later. Why don’t we make it for the 11th. Then we can get the midweek supersaver fare.”

  “Dad, I’m not going back to live with you in Melvin. It’s too late. I can’t anymore.”

  “Ingrid, you have a summer job, not a lifetime commitment to these people.”

  “It’s not that.” Her throat was so tight she had difficulty speaking. “It’s not the job, it’s that—I’m not—I just can’t go back to living in Melvin again. I’m sorry.”

  She began to cry. At the other end of the line her father went silent, helpless at the sound of his daughter weeping.

  Through her gulping attempts to stop, Ingrid heard him say something muffled with his hand over the receiver. Then he said, speaking to her again, “Hold on a second, sweetie. Linda wants to talk to you.”

  A woman’s voice came on the line. “Hello, Ingrid? This is Linda. How are you?”

  Ingrid, trying to regain control of herself, didn’t answer. She didn’t want to lose Evelyn jumping up on the guard rail in her stocking feet and sitting beside her in the Saab and saying now put your foot on the clutch like this, slow and easy, and pressing her thigh to show how much pressure to give—and here Ingrid’s heart turned over, as if trying to flop itself closer to wherever Evelyn was.

  “I just want to say I can really understand ho
w you feel,” Linda was saying. “This is a big surprise for you. We haven’t had a chance to spend much time together, so of course the idea of getting a brand new family seems a little scary—”

  “It isn’t that,” Ingrid managed. She thought of the neutron bomb, the one that killed only living things while leaving buildings intact. If she had to leave Evelyn, that bomb would go off in her heart, leave an empty shell of a building where once there had been Ingrid’s life.

  “But I know how much your dad misses you,” Linda was saying, “and how much we both want to have you with us here in Melvin.”

  “I can’t go back to Melvin,” Ingrid repeated. Maybe if she just kept saying it, eventually they would hear her.

  “I know you might feel that way now. But your dad thinks, and I really do agree with him, that you’ll be happier here. I know you had some trouble in ninth grade at the public school, so we don’t want you to feel you have to go back there, if that’s what’s bothering you. Melanie’s just finished her first year there and she loves it, but you have a choice. Your dad and I have looked into a very good private school near Irvine that we think you might like. You could transfer there from the public high school after the fall semester, or, if you were willing to come home before August fifteenth, the admissions office said you could have an interview and possibly still get in for this September. It’s really your choice, Ingrid.”

  “My choice is to stay here,” Ingrid said. She wasn’t crying any more. She was on the verge of screaming.

  “Ingrid, look,” Linda said, her voice taking on an edge of irritation, “There’s a stability that comes from being with your family that you just can’t get in boarding school.”

  “I don’t want family stability, I want to stay here with Evelyn and Ray!”

  “Let’s calm down a minute,” said Linda, whose voice was no longer calm. “I want you to give us a chance. Once you really get to know us, I think you’ll see that as a family, we’re a pretty nice group.”

  “This isn’t the fucking Brady Bunch,” Ingrid screamed, no longer able to stand it. She slammed the receiver back down on its cradle, threw herself onto the sofa in a way that Detective Slade would never do, and sobbed.

  Ray had found a little relief from his thoughts in the distraction of physical work. He’d taken apart the window frame and studied it, how the wood had been steamed and bent to that beautiful curve, how the broken glass must have been blown to match it. He decided there was no reason he couldn’t learn glass blowing. The best cure for any ailment of the heart, he thought, was to learn something new, to apply yourself until you’d mastered it. Turn the salt of tears into the sweat of honest labor and all that. On the strength of this conviction he mixed a double Manhattan and sat at his desk drinking and leafing through his restoration manuals, turning the removed pieces of framing over in his hands, which were the first hands to touch their inside seams since they had been installed a hundred years ago by some long-dead master craftsman. In a moment of appreciation for this man, whoever he was, Ray closed his eyes, and leaned back in his chair, the wood in his hands like an offering, his mind at rest in a moment of calm equilibrium.

  Then Ingrid burst into the study, her face wet and trembling. Ray felt his heart slip the leash he’d been trying to affix to it all day and run to her, a dog recognizing its owner. But the window, his mind protested. But learning to blow glass.

  “My father’s getting married,” Ingrid wept. “He wants me to go back to Orange County in two weeks for the wedding and then stay and go to high school there. Just pick up and leave and not even go back to Newell, Ray, he wants me to move back there.”

  “Oh, Ingrid.” Ray felt as if he’d been knocked down.

  Ingrid wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Can you call him or something and tell him I can’t go?”

  “You can’t go,” Ray said. Not knowing he was going to say it. Stop, said his mind, and his mouth tried to make what he’d just said mean something different: “I mean, you were so unhappy there, you said.”

  “I know, but I can’t explain it to him. Can you tell him you need me to stay and help you with the book?” She sat down hard on the edge of the desk and sobbed in earnest. “Ray, I can’t leave. I don’t care about anyone except you guys.”

  Ray felt his throat tighten and ache with the effort of holding back the reply he wanted to make, could not make. But he must do something. He stood up and put out a hand to stroke her head, an attempt at comfort that seemed safe in that it reminded him of stroking a dog or a cat, but the feel of her rough hair under his hand was too much. He took his hand away, placed it instead on her back and patted her in a there-there sort of way. The hard bony knobs of her vertebrae lay beneath his hand like a row of perfect marbles. He took a breath and pulled his hand away.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, less to comfort her than to ground himself in the reality of the situation by speaking—I am comforting her because she is crying, and that is all. “Don’t worry, Ingrid,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.”

  At this Ingrid let out her breath and leaned against him. Now the top of her head was suddenly under his nose. He was inhaling the scent of her hair, rain and nicotine and traces of something that reminded him of Evelyn, her face lotion maybe. Ingrid was leaning against him, the heat of her body seeping into him as taste of a wine might seep in over his tongue. He was not Ray anymore, he was the heat of her body, he was pure desire that existed beyond words and so could not be reasoned with. He kissed the top of her head. He kissed her forehead, felt the faint sheen of skin oil against his lips. And then Ingrid, sitting on the desk, put her arms around him. As if she had been changed by being in the presence of desire, as if it had become part of her too, for she was holding him, her arms roped around his neck, her breasts pressed into his chest, his neck alive with the tickle of her breathing. Her body pressed up against him was warm and solid and he felt himself melting. He kissed her mouth; it was salty with tears. Her lips opened and turned tangy and then sweet as she kissed him back. He tasted her tongue and teeth, he was drowning in sweetness. For the better part of five eternal seconds, he kissed her and kissed her and then Ingrid froze in his arms. He did not let himself notice this for one desperate last moment, clinging to this delirious bliss that was damning him, but then her lips went completely stiff; she clamped her mouth shut and turned away in his embrace and said: “Don’t.”

  Ray opened his eyes. Here was his life. Ingrid at the center of it saying Don’t, her face dissolving deeper into tears.

  Ray stumbled a step back, felt sick.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Ingrid’s mouth opened and what came out was a sob. She pressed her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.

  He heard her go down the hall, heard her close her bedroom door. Heard her crying, long sobs indifferently muffled, the abandoned wails of a young child.

  He looked around the study and tried to get some bearing on himself. A hole had opened up in the pit of his stomach and his heart had run out through it. And with it, he thought, the last of his morals. There was only darkness there now, a darkness permeated by guilt and disgust and the horrible undeniable persistence of desire. Ingrid could call the police, she could tell Evelyn, she could leave forever and he would never see her again. Each of these possibilities produced the same flare of panic in his chest. Down the hall he she was still crying. In the sea of the sound of her sobs Ray sat down, put his head on the desk and cried, too, not only because he had hurt Ingrid, not only for the loss of her who he could never ever have, but for the loss of the part of himself he most cherished: the part he thought of as Arthur Braeburn Shepard, a good man.

  Ingrid lay face down on her bed and tried to hold her breath to make herself stop crying. Was this despair? She did not want to leave this bedroom with its old polished floorboards for the gold shag carpets of Melvin, California. The muggy heat of green and thunderstorms for the dry browns and yellows of parched earth. She did no
t want to leave Evelyn who she loved so dangerously there was no way to show it, and she did not want to leave Ray who had kissed her too wetly and left a raw wire sparking inside her, in her stomach, her throat, her crotch, the backs of her knees. Ingrid got up and shut the door and then took out the bottle of lotion she had stolen from Evelyn’s dressing table. The smell of it in her hand made her heart lurch just as if Evelyn herself were suddenly there. Ingrid rubbed the lotion onto her face, her throat, then yanked up her shirt and spread lotion over the ache in her chest. She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of Evelyn from her hands. She pushed the bottle of lotion between her legs and clamped her thighs around it. She moved against it, back and forth, back and forth until she was warm and then burning and then coming and then just dead. She lay there and imagined she was dead, and did not have to think or cry or explain or feel anything any more.

  Playing dead she fell asleep.

  She slept for hours. Through dinner, through darkness, into night. She dreamed she was back in Melvin and it was even browner than she remembered. Even the leaves on the eucalyptus trees were brown, and the brown haze you could usually see only on the horizon was so thick it was all around her, hanging cloudy in the air before her eyes. The ground was cracked and wavy with heat. Her father was there, coming toward her through this hot brown haze.

  He came up beside her. “Oh, Ingrid,” he said dazedly, “Ingrid, look.” He gazed stupidly around them at the destroyed landscape and Ingrid understood that this was the nuclear winter she had warned him about, but she had gotten it wrong; it was nuclear summer, everything hot and brown, waterless and lifeless, forever.

  “Ingrid, Ingrid,” he said, and kept saying it, louder and louder until she woke up. “Ingrid,” he said again though she was awake now. She sat up and looked around in confusion. Everything was dark and there was a man standing at her bedroom door.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s me,” said Ray.