Ingrid rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
Ray didn’t answer. It was nearly two in the morning. He had told Evelyn that Ingrid didn’t feel well and had fallen asleep and not to wake her. It had been torturous holding himself still through dinner, imagining Ingrid lying upstairs not asleep at all but terrified and panicked in the darkness. Wondering whether she would come down and accuse him. Evelyn went to bed around midnight and then for the next several hours Ray had walked back and forth through the downstairs rooms in panic. Finally he went upstairs and knocked on her bedroom door, unable to spend another minute under the weight of what he had done.
There was a light switch just inside the door to Ingrid’s room but he did not touch it. He was afraid to look at the mirror of her face, which would show him what kind of monster he’d become.
“What are you doing here?” Ingrid asked after a moment.
“I came in to tell you I’m sorry,” he said.
“What?”
He came all the way into the room and shut the door, just in case Evelyn woke up. “I’m sorry I kissed you. I’m disgusted with myself.”
“Oh—” she was silent a moment, and then she reached over and pulled the chain on the bedside lamp. The room burst into brightness and he saw she was looking at him with no particular expression at all.
“It’s okay,” she said at last.
“It’s not okay—you’re sixteen years old.” Ray took a few steps further into the room and held onto the footboard of the bed to steady himself. “It isn’t okay. I heard you crying.”
“I’m all right,” Ingrid said. “It’s just—Ray, I can’t go back to Melvin.”
Ray felt a wave of dizziness pass through him. She was all right, she didn’t hate him? And she didn’t want to leave? He felt unmoored from his sense of having done wrong: Ingrid wanted to stay here. To stay here with him, perhaps kiss him again. Oh God, what was wrong with him? The desire welling up in him felt indistinguishable from nausea; he took a breath and forced himself to say: “You have to go back. Your father wants you to go home.”
“What do you mean—don’t you want me here?”
He wanted to throw himself on the floor, he wanted to scream, he wanted to kick the bed until his foot broke, he wanted to hold her.
He said, and listened to himself say it, “If your father wants you back home, you should go. You have to. He’s getting married.”
See, he thought. I am all right. I can do this.
“But you just said not to worry, we’d figure something out so I don’t have to go back.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray said. I’m not so far gone as I’d feared.
“But Ray, you said you’d help me. So I can stay here.”
Did she love him, was that what she was saying?
“I mean, all you have to do is call my dad and tell him I’m helping you type your book, and we’ll say you have a deadline, and you can’t get anyone else—”
She is sixteen years old; she doesn’t know what she’s saying. “Ingrid,” he said, “don’t do this. It’s bad enough as it is. You have to leave.”
“What’s bad enough? What did I do?”
“You haven’t done anything—my God, Ingrid, it isn’t your fault.”
Sitting in her bed under the sheet, Ingrid felt cold again. She had never seen an adult’s face tremble the way Ray’s did, as if it would dissolve like paper in water. It frightened her and she looked away; her eyes fell on the stolen bottle of lotion lying beside the bed. An awful thought came to her.
“Is it Evelyn?” she asked. “Does Evelyn want me to leave?”
“Of course she doesn’t. But she doesn’t know—” he stopped.
“Is it Evelyn you’re worried about? Because you kissed me? Look, Ray, it was a five second kiss and it will never happen again, okay? I don’t even know why it happened in the first place, and I won’t tell Evelyn about it, I mean, it’s not like I even wanted—it was just an accident, I didn’t even want—”
“For God’s sake,” he said, “stop talking like it’s your fault. It’s not.”
“Then why can’t I stay? What’s the fucking problem?”
As she said it he felt a huge tenderness crack open in him. Yaw open, a rift in the ground of his life into which tumbled buildings and cars and telephone poles and everything that meant civilization because he all at once he understood exactly what the fucking problem was: what he was experiencing was not simply a silly crush on a teenage girl, an embarrassing fantasy he’d jerked off to a couple of guilt-ridden times. It was not his cock that swelled at the sight of her. It was his heart. That is what is wrong with me, he thought. That is what is crushingly, horribly wrong: I love her.
I love you. I’m in love with you. That is the fucking problem.
“You have to go back to your father’s,” he said. Ingrid stared at him a moment, then threw herself down on the pillow and pulled the bedspread up over her head.
“Ingrid? Please try to understand.”
She spoke from under the chenille. “You can get out of my room now.”
“Ingrid, believe me, the last thing I want to do is make you unhappy—”
“Go to bed, Ray. Goodbye.”
“Can I just say one thing?” he asked.
“What?” Muffled by the pillow.
He did not know what—something that would undo the mess he was making, something that would make things all right again. Something that would make her take the sheet from her face and look at him.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said.
When she spoke he could hear the scowl in her voice. “Whatever that means.”
“And—about the other thing. I’m sorry. It will never happen again.”
“Will you stop apologizing? It doesn’t matter. Just go.”
He left, feeling a blanket of dizziness envelope him as he crossed the room, looked back at the shrouded shape of her and said, “All right, good night then.”
Then he stood there a moment longer. Long enough to realize his apology was irrelevant, because he was still wanting her to uncover her eyes and look at him, incline her head toward his, hold out her arms, and that if she had done that he would have gone to her and let her arms go around him; if she had offered her lips he would have taken them; if she had touched the mattress and looked at him and said come here he would have obeyed, and lain down beside her. And if Ingrid’s absence of invitation was all that stood between him and his own damnation, then he was beyond being saved. He backed out of the room, still looking at her shape under the bedspread, his face on fire with desire’s dirty little sister, shame.
19.
Ingrid woke in the morning disoriented and queasy. She was still wearing the clothes she had fallen asleep in last night. In the bathroom she looked in the mirror and saw dark circles under her eyes, her bed-tangled hair sticking out in different directions.
I look like a junkie, she thought, and somehow this made the nausea in her stomach seem more manageable. She ran her hand through her hair. It should be much shorter. Thug-short, jailhouse short, the pink scalp shining through. What she really needed was electric hair clippers, but for now she would use the orange handled scissors from Evelyn’s sewing basket. If her dad and Linda wanted her in the wedding they could have her in it—with a shaved head.
She worked hastily, lifting chunks of hair between her fingers and cutting at random. When she had finished, all the dye was gone and a half an inch of light brown hair stuck up in patches around her scalp. Linda and her father would hate it. Ray would hate it. Evelyn would hate it. Maybe it would distract Evelyn’s attention from the radioactive glow around Ingrid’s mouth, ignited by Ray’s kiss. Evelyn’s husband. She gathered up her hair and threw it in the trash, wiped the hair out of the sink with wet toilet paper. She sat on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. Threw a palmful of cold water in the general direction of her face and went downstairs.
Evelyn was in the kitchen, taking all the can
s out of one cupboard and moving them into another. She looked up as Ingrid came in.
“Jesus Christ, girl.”
Ingrid ignored her, opened the refrigerator, took out the first thing she saw. Ajar of pickles.
“What the hell did you do to your hair?”
Since the answer was obvious, Ingrid said nothing, opened the jar. But the pungent sweet scent made her feel sick; she put the jar back in the fridge.
“Christ,” Evelyn said again. “I would have cut it for you, if you’d asked me. I’m getting my hair cut this afternoon—you could’ve come with me and had them do yours too.”
“It was kind of a spur of the moment thing,” Ingrid said. Apparently Evelyn couldn’t see Ray’s kisses all over Ingrid’s mouth. “Did Ray say anything last night?” she asked.
“Yeah, he said you weren’t feeling well and not to wake you.”
“I’m not sick,” Ingrid started, and found she was crying again. She’d thought she’d cried as much as it was possible to cry the night before, but there seemed to be an underground stream inside her. A welling up from below.
“Then what is it? Don’t worry about your hair—we can get you a really good wig.”
“I’m not crying about my hair,” Ingrid said viciously. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried to get her voice to come out steady. “My dad called yesterday. He’s getting married and he wants me to come back to California for good. He wants me to just drop everything and fly back like next week and be in his stupid wedding. I tried to explain I can’t go, but he doesn’t listen.” She sat down on a kitchen stool, still crying despite her efforts.
“How long would you have to stay?”
“What do you mean, how long? He wants me to move back, go to school there and everything. I told him I can’t, that I need to stay here, that—” she couldn’t say, that I need to be with you –“that I hate living in Melvin. But he doesn’t get it.”
“He really wants you to move back there?” The dismay in Evelyn’s voice made Ingrid look up.
“That’s what I’m telling you. Yes.”
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Evelyn said. “If you leave it will be awful. You’re my only friend here.”
She wants me to stay. She needs me here. So I can’t go.
“My life is so different now that you’re in it. If you leave, I’ll start hating it again.”
“You hate your life?”
“I mean—” Evelyn turned away and reached for the coffee percolator. “I love Ray, I love this house—” She trailed off and busied herself with pouring in the water, measuring out the coffee. Then she faced Ingrid. “I mean that it’s better with you here. With you here I can—I don’t know—breathe.”
“That’s how I feel in California. Like I can’t breathe there. It’s not just the smog.”
“It’s funny,” Evelyn said. “I always wanted to go to California. Like I told you. I used to buy movie magazines and I’d even cut out pictures of Hollywood and tape them into this scrap book I had. And here you are, you’re supposed to go and you don’t want to. Hey, maybe we should trade: I’ll go to California, and you can stay here with Ray.”
The image was upon her, a reel from an old movie: Evelyn bound for California, climbing the metal steps of an old twin-engine airplane, holding Ingrid’s luggage and the iguana cage. Then a camera pan to Ingrid, alone with Ray, Ray was kissing her the way Arthur Slade had kissed Emily Roseine, the heat of it like a gunshot wound Mister, and at this point the image began to skip, as if the film inside her head had come unthreaded from the projector. Unthreaded from her stomach.
“Hey,” Evelyn said, “don’t look at me like that. I was joking.”
I heard the noise before I knew what it was, a flash of metal behind my ear and then a fast hot pain as lights exploded in my head and I went down. And oh, Mister, whoever thinks a dame can’t double cross you never met this one. While you’re thinking she’d never hurt you you’re lying there shot and bleeding to death—
I’m going to throw up, Ingrid thought.
She ran out of the kitchen, Evelyn calling behind her, ran down the hall, she was crying again, into the first floor bathroom where she slammed and locked the door behind her, sat on the edge of the clawfoot tub and turned on the faucets, flipped up the lid of the toilet and stuck her finger down her throat.
“Ingrid? Are you all right?”
“I’m taking a bath,” Ingrid choked out. Hysterical. Going to pieces. Just like a dame.
“No you’re not.” Evelyn rattled the lock. “Come out of there, please?”
Ingrid lay down on the tiled floor and curled into a ball and closed her eyes.
This is what the bad stuff looks like, Mister. And bad leaves room for worse.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she sat up and turned off the water. Fifteen minutes, half an hour? She leaned against the side of the tub.
When I came to, I didn’t know where I was. I was lying face down in the sand. I’d been eating sand for breakfast. I didn’t like it. I sat up. It was morning and I was alone in an empty stretch of California desert, nothing but sagebrush and saguaros around me. Nothing moved in the still, burning air, not even a lizard to keep me company and let me know I wasn’t the only living thing left in the world.
A hard place, the California desert. Anyone who thinks it’s beautiful has another home to go back to.
“Ingrid?” said Evelyn’s voice.
Oh no, Evelyn was still out there; she must have been sitting on the other side of the bathroom door the entire time.
“What,” Ingrid said, now feeling embarrassed.
“Please open the door.”
Ingrid flipped back the latch but left the door shut. “Open it yourself if you want to.”
Evelyn opened the door, came in and sat down on the toilet seat. She didn’t speak. Whenever she herself had gone to hide in bathrooms, part of the appeal had been the quiet. After a while, Ingrid reached for some toilet paper and blew her nose, then looked up at Evelyn.
“You okay?” Evelyn asked.
Ingrid shrugged.
“I spent half my first marriage hiding in a bathroom a quarter this size. This one’s a lot nicer.”
“Hiding why?”
“Why do you think?” Evelyn said. “My husband was a drunk. I got tired of getting socked all the time.”
Ingrid raised her head and Evelyn saw a look of satisfaction flicker across her tear-stained face.
“I knew it,” Ingrid said. “When I first saw that scar on your hand, the one the tiger made, I thought it was something your husband did. And that that was why you always wore long sleeves, because you had other scars, like if he used to beat you up all the time.”
Evelyn put her head to one side. “You bothered to think all that about me?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I just thought it. So it’s true, you wear long sleeves because you have scars?”
“You’re a good guesser. But no, not scars, exactly.”
Show her, the ghost of Joe Cullen urged. Show her what I did for your body. How I made you someone.
Evelyn pulled the rubber band free from the tucked-over sleeve of her blouse. Drum roll, please, she was doing it, she pushed the blue cotton up over her elbow and there, laaadies and gennntlemennn, an orange Japanese-style carp swimming through turquoise water and dark green lily pads.
Ingrid sucked in her breath. Let it out.
Evelyn saw something shadowy get up and leave Ingrid’s face, saw the crack of light fall across it instead, saw Ingrid’s mouth open like a door.
“Oh,” Ingrid said softly. “Oh.” She looked up at Evelyn. “They’re beautiful.” Her hand made a little involuntary movement in her lap, like a child reaching for something shiny. “Why keep them hidden?”
Evelyn made a snorting sound. “You don’t know the answer to that one? Ray’s friends, and his colleagues, they can’t stand me anyway; they think I’m an idiot. This would really be the end. ‘A ta
ttooed lady, he married a tattooed lady.’”
“It’s not just your arm then? How high do they go?”
Evelyn unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, opened the collar. A rose entwined in thorns, two butterflies holding a banner that read “forever,” and poking up from beneath her loosened collar, the bright orange tips of the sun’s rays.
“But…but….” Ingrid said. And stared some more. “But they’re beautiful. Are they all over your back and stuff too?”
“Yeah. Joe did them.” Evelyn rebuttoned her collar. “So now you know.”
“Could I—” Ingrid started, but cut herself off. Could I see them she was dying to say, but would the words come out meaning only that? Or would they give away the other thing, that see them meant touch them; that touch them meant touch you.
Could I touch you.
Ingrid looked at the re-buttoned blue blouse that hid the key to everything and said instead, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Evelyn traced her finger over the tiles on the wall. “At first it was because I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of freak.”
Evelyn spoke the last word, freak, so sharply that it hooked inside Ingrid and stayed there, tugging. What did that make her, Ingrid? The chain reaction that occurred inside her each time Evelyn touched her, the secret of fusion, the endlessly multiplying power, did that make Ingrid a freak too? Was that what Evelyn would think she was?
“And then after,” Evelyn was saying, “I guess I didn’t want you to know about the tattoos because I didn’t want you looking at me and thinking ‘she’s got tattoos,’ all the time. I mean, I have them, but there’s more to me than that. Hey, hello? Where’d you go?”
“Um, nowhere.” Ingrid looked away from the only bit of tattoo still visible, the blue-green edge of a pond and the gold tip of a fin on Evelyn’s arm. She looked instead at the white tiles on the floor, but the tattoo’s afterimage wavered there too, the pond now red-orange, the fish green. Evelyn must know what she was feeling; her face was so hot it was going to melt.
Say something to make her think you don’t want to rip off her stupid blouse and tattoo her with your tongue, something to make her think you aren’t a freak of nature.
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