The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  When the eyeliner tube was empty, Ingrid rummaged in the drawer again. There was a curling iron, a nightlight in the shape of a seashell, jars of pancake makeup. She tried the drawer on the right. This drawer held a tangle of flimsy things: pantyhose and a beige-colored slip and there, in the back, something blue and sequined and eye-catching. Ingrid pulled it out, expecting some kind of sexy underwear. But it was a leotard. Bright blue, with blue and silver sequins sewed on. The leotard had long sleeves of sheer beige nylon onto which more sequins had been sewn. It looked like something a figure skating champion would wear. A circus costume, she realized.

  Be careful, Slade. Don’t get caught. Ingrid refolded it, slid it back under the balls of panty hose toward the back of the drawer. Her fingers grazed a sudden hardness. A cool-surfaced something. Was it a vibrator? Her fingers closed around it all by themselves, drew it out of the drawer. No, it was a little toy gun, a revolver with an inlaid wood grip, its length not quite the length of her hand. She cocked the hammer, which felt stiff, as if it wasn’t meant to really move, and trained the gun’s nose on Ray’s alarm clock. Squared her shoulders and whispered, Pow.

  But if the gun was a toy, why was it so heavy? Ingrid dropped it on the rug, realizing all at once what it was she was holding.

  A real gun, this was. Not a toy and not a gun in her story but a real revolver that might actually shoot something. Ingrid watched it lying there as if it were a small and possibly fierce animal whose movements could not be predicted. After a moment, during which the gun did not go off of its own accord, Ingrid picked it up again, holding the butt with two fingers.

  Outside the window came the sound of Ray’s car. Ingrid leapt up from the dressing table, shoved the gun back in the drawer and slipped out of the bedroom, ran down the hall to her own room and got into the closet. She sat in the hot darkness while downstairs Ray’s key turned in the lock.

  Only one set of footsteps came in—Ray’s. She heard him come up the stairs and go into the master bedroom. She heard another door open and shut, and then, faintly, the noise of the shower.

  And now it occurred to her to be surprised that she’d found a gun in their bedroom. Ray had said he’d never even fired one, that he didn’t know anything about guns. Which meant he didn’t know anything about this one, didn’t even know it was here.

  What did it mean that Evelyn had a gun in her dresser drawer?

  Mister, the case I had to crack was not the one I was hired for.

  Mister, I’m alone in the desert.

  I am with you but I am not one of you.

  She scratched a mosquito bite on her arm and felt the lipstick heart smear under her hand.

  And I’m a marked man.

  After leaving Joanne’s apartment and driving as fast as it was possible to drive through Cambridge at rush hour, Ray arrived in front of the hair salon in Harvard Square an hour and ten minutes late. Evelyn was not there, of course. He drove home, now really in a state of terror, his mind racing with possible excuses: he’d gotten the time mixed up. He thought she was meeting him at his office. He had to work late and couldn’t find the phone number of the salon—oh what did it matter, he smelled like sex and panic and Joanne’s cat’s hair was all over his slacks.

  The house seemed empty. Ray’s first thought was that Evelyn had somehow found out about Joanne and left him. Though he knew it was ridiculous he ran upstairs to their room to be sure she hadn’t packed up and gone. Her makeup, her toothbrush, her bathrobe were all still there. But suppose Ingrid had told Evelyn about the kiss? Suppose Evelyn was down at the police station reporting him? Suppose she had taken Ingrid to Liz Luce’s house to keep her safe, suppose Ingrid had told them both?

  Stop thinking like that, he told himself. Ingrid had said she wouldn’t tell anyone. Detective Slade never rats on a client. Oh, why had he done this to her?

  He took off his clothes and got into the shower to scrub away the evidence of Joanne.

  A few minutes later he heard Evelyn downstairs calling Hello!

  Her voice sounded normal enough. A minute later, she came into the bedroom.

  “Ray?”

  “I’m in here,” Ray answered, stomach turning over. The bathroom door opened and in came Evelyn, holding the strings of a dozen helium balloons.

  What was going on? She stood there on the bath mat, balloons bobbing on the ceiling, her hair freshly cut and moussed up into a ridiculous bird’s nest of waves above her face, her face smiling at him, his wife, he loved her, he had cheated on her this afternoon.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” she said. “These balloons are for you.”

  “Balloons?” he repeated faintly.

  “You seemed so down this morning,” she said, “and the balloons looked so cheery.”

  “I forgot to pick you up,” he mumbled, his voice catching. “I’m sorry.”

  “I knew you were going to forget. You’ve been so distracted lately. It’s all right.”

  He shut off the water. He was a heel, he was scum.

  “Now you have to forgive me,” Evelyn said. “There’s no dinner and I’m not cooking. It’s too hot.”

  “That’s fine,” Ray said. He dried himself off. He hadn’t eaten anything all day except the bread and olives he’d had at Joanne’s, but he could not face a meal around the dining room table, his wife on one side of him and Ingrid on the other. He pulled on a pair of pajamas, as if covering up his body might mitigate what it had done, and lay down on the bed. Evelyn was looking at her hair in the mirror.

  “Your haircut looks nice,” he said. A whisper of a voice.

  Evelyn turned from the mirror, saw him lying on the bed.

  “You look like hell. Are you sick?”

  “I feel sick,” he said.

  She sat down beside him and put her hand on his forehead. Could she tell he’d just made love to someone else? Was Joanne leaking out through his pores?

  “You do feel warm. I’ll make you some soup.”

  “Would you bring it to me up here?” He tried a smile, and she kissed the top of his head.

  “Of course,” she said. “I knew I got those balloons for a reason—you can pretend you’re in the hospital.”

  “I don’t know that that’s conducive to regaining one’s health.”

  Evelyn patted his leg under the sheet. “Now listen: sick or not, we have to figure out what we’re going to do about Ingrid.”

  Ray tried to keep his expression absolutely neutral. “You mean about her father wanting her to move back to California?”

  “Well, Jesus, Ray, yes. She said she told you and you said everything would be all right, which she seems to think means we can fix it so she won’t have to go. So what’s the plan?”

  Ray closed his eyes. “There is no plan.”

  “Well, we should think of one.”

  He looked at his wife again. “You know what, sweetheart? I can’t have this conversation right now. I’ve had three hours of sleep and I don’t feel well and I have a blinding headache. If you would be kind enough to heat me up some soup and then let me go to sleep, I would be truly grateful. We can talk about Ingrid tomorrow.”

  She stood up, looking down at him, searching his face. What was on his face that she might see? He rolled over on his side and said to the pillow, “I just want to eat some soup and go to sleep. Let’s just sleep on everything, okay?” Let’s just sleep with everything.

  “I’ll bring you some soup,” Evelyn said, her voice with an elsewhere sound to it.

  Hours later Ray awoke in the darkness with tears in his eyes. Evelyn was lying beside him now, asleep as well. The green glow of the clock on the nightstand said 1:15.

  Her mouth was partly open and her breath smelled faintly of toothpaste, her hair of salon shampoo.

  Lying beside her he felt dirty. He wanted another shower, but taking one in the master bathroom would wake her up, and using the bathroom Ingrid used was out of the question. He went downstairs to the bathroom off the hall—no shower there, on
ly the original claw foot tub—and splashed some water on his face.

  He tried to think. It was clearly time for some damage control. He was fairly sure that Joanne would feel as he did, embarrassed by their impulsive and wholly unprofessional behavior. He would talk to her, apologize profusely, and they would put it behind them for the good of both the office and his marriage. But the conversation with Joanne would have to wait a day; tomorrow he was supposed spend the whole day at a jobsite in Boston. And tomorrow after work he would talk to Evelyn. Not to confess—there was no way he could confess, not about Joanne and certainly not about Ingrid. That would be part of his punishment, that he’d have to hold the secret alone. But he would tell her that they needed to send Ingrid back to California immediately. It was what her father wanted, and they were obligated to comply. That was the right thing to do, the adult thing. If he were the one to send Ingrid away, perhaps he could have a clear conscience again.

  And maybe then he would not be hearing this tiny voice inside him, whispering that perhaps once things had settled down, once he was over this season of craziness, he would be able to see Ingrid again, that after a few weeks with her family she would come back here for school in the fall and she could come over on the weekends, and it would be as before, it would be safe and normal and he wouldn’t have to let her go completely.

  21.

  Ingrid lay on her stomach on the grass and watched Evelyn set up the barbecue. She had been smoking almost nonstop to try to get rid of the sick feeling that had taken over her stomach ever since Ray had kissed her in the study. My stomach cinching tighter than a hangman’s noose, Mister. The incessant smoking had done nothing to ease the knot in her guts, but it had made her feel light-headed, and that was better than nothing. She lit a new cigarette off the end of the last one and watched Evelyn rip oven a package of charcoal briquettes.

  “If I do go to the wedding,” Ingrid said, “maybe once I’m there, in person, they’ll realize they don’t want me living with them. I’d be a bad influence on my new stepsister.”

  Evelyn arranged the charcoal. “What do you think they’ll say about your hair?”

  Ingrid ran her hand over her stubbly scalp. “What they’ll do is, they’ll ignore my hair completely until right before the wedding. Then they’ll try to get me to wear some flowered straw bonnet or something so it doesn’t show.” Ingrid wiped sweat off her face. “Aren’t you melting in those long sleeves?”

  “I’m used to it.”

  “Now that I know about your tattoos, though, you don’t really have to keep them covered up.” Perhaps Evelyn would let her see them again.

  “There’s still the neighbors,” Evelyn said. “Besides, the sun is bad for tattoo ink. It makes the colors bleed.”

  “Is that why all those old Navy guys have such gross tattoos?”

  “Either that or because they weren’t done with tattoo equipment.”

  “How could you do a tattoo with no tattoo equipment?”

  “People find ways. Not just on ships. In jails, too.”

  “But how?”

  Something in Ingrid’s voice made Evelyn look up from the grill. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just wondering.”

  “You’re not thinking of doing one, are you? Because a jailhouse tattoo looks like hell.”

  “I was thinking I could put it in my detective story. So how do you do one?”

  Evelyn sat down on the lawn chair. “Well, you need ink first. In the old days, the sailors or prisoners burned pages of whatever book they could get, which was usually a Bible, so they could get at the ink. You burn a page and mix the ashes with water. That’s your ink. Then you get a needle and thread, and you wrap the needle with thread like you’re whipping rope around a post, tight around it, and then you dip the whole thing in your homemade ink. The thread soaks it up. And then you just make pricks in your skin with the needle, and the ink drips off the thread and goes under your skin and there you go.”

  “Cool,” Ingrid said. “That’s totally cool.”

  “Like I said, though, it looks like hell.” Evelyn got up and stirred the briquettes, which were beginning to turn gray.

  Ingrid sat up in the grass. “I want a tattoo.”

  Evelyn turned around. “No you don’t. Believe me, you don’t—it’s a drag. You’ll just end up having to hide it, so people won’t think you’re some degenerate weirdo.”

  “But I am a degenerate weirdo,” Ingrid said, with such force that Evelyn stepped back. Ingrid was biting her lip and blinking hard.

  “Hey, come on, now.” Evelyn sat down beside Ingrid and took hold of her hand, laced Ingrid’s fingers through her own. “Come on. You aren’t a weirdo. You’re just, you know. How about, you’re original. Now come on, forget the tattoo idea. I have an idea for what to do about your dad. I’m thinking, what if you told your him that we invited you to live here for the fall?”

  “You mean, here in the house? Like instead of in the dorms at Newell?”

  “Yeah. Look, go to the wedding and act really sweet—we’ll get you a nice wig to wear—and then you can pitch it to him that we want you to live with us. He’d save a lot of money that way, right? Maybe he’ll go for it.”

  To be in the same house with Evelyn for the whole year? To come here at night after classes like a day student? To have Evelyn holding her hand like this, to have dinner with Evelyn every night, to drive beside her in the car on the weekends, to drink wine coolers, to—Ray was in this house too. The thought of Ray, of his mouth pressed desperately against hers, made her feel sick at her stomach again.

  She asked, “Is that Ray’s idea, to have me live here in the fall?”

  “No, mine,” said Evelyn proudly. “I was going to tell him last night, but he wasn’t feeling well and then he fell asleep. How about we put it to him when he gets home? He’ll go for it—you know Ray loves you.”

  Ingrid was silent.

  “Okay?” Evelyn asked.

  Ingrid looked down at Evelyn. Tiger scar. Tattoos on her arms. Gun in her drawer. Hair permanently on fire. The love of my life, Mister.

  “Okay,” she said, in a voice that came out small.

  Ray pulled into the driveway and shut off the Saab’s engine but did not get out of the car. He had been downtown at a job site most of the day, and had only seen Joanne for a moment as he hurried past her desk while she was talking on the phone. Ingrid would be even more disgusted with him than she already was if she knew he’d cheated on Evelyn. Ingrid would—he broke off the thought, disgusted with himself: Ingrid, Ingrid, Ingrid—he should be thinking about his wife. Where was Evelyn in all this? He remembered a story his college roommate had once told him. A drunken night in Paris, during which the roommate had accepted an invitation from some Moroccans to drive with them to a bar outside the city. The roommate had gotten quite drunk, and when the bar closed hours later, he discovered that his new friends and their car had disappeared. He had no idea where he was, so he simply began walking through the deserted streets of the suburb, looking for someone of whom he could ask directions. But his French was so limited that when he finally met a man stumbling home from some other pub, all Ray’s roommate could say was, “Ou est Paris?”

  Ray had laughed and laughed hearing that story, because how could you lose an entire city, and of all cities, Paris? How could you not know in which direction Paris lay? But that was how he felt about Evelyn now; he had lost all sense of which direction he needed to turn to come back to her. How was it possible? She was his wife. The first woman he’d ever fallen in love with, the first woman he’d allowed himself to be changed by. He had thought he could see her lights from everywhere.

  But ou est Evelyn? Ray got out of the car and took a deep breath to rid himself of the day’s anxiety. Hoping the contents of his mind did not show on his face, he went through the house and out to the back yard and up to his wife where she was turning chicken on the grill.

  He kissed her, sweet and sweaty, kissed her again. Only the
n looked over at Ingrid, who was sitting on a towel in the grass.

  She’d cut all her hair off. Shaved it right off. Like what girls do before they enter a convent. He felt a fresh wash of shame break over him. Was this uglification intended for him? Because of him?

  “Hi, Ingrid,” he said in what he hoped was a neutral tone.

  Ingrid nodded her head slightly to show she’d heard him but didn’t answer, got busy lighting a cigarette.

  Well, that was how she should react; she shouldn’t look at him. He didn’t deserve it. She was upset, afraid, angry; that was how you should feel when someone twice your age kisses you. Oh, what could he do to undo what he’d done? He wanted to make peace. He wanted to tell Ingrid that the last thing in the world he wanted was to hurt her, and yet he had. He wanted her to forgive him and not hate him. To look at him at least. And he wanted to kiss her, oh yes, there it was, welling up inside of him again, he wanted to press his mouth to hers and drink her, gather her body into his arms and hold her there.

  I have fallen into some kind of dementia, he thought. Anything that passes through my head becomes something I actually want to do.

  He turned from the women—one with hair the color of flames, leaning over the barbecue turning chicken breasts; one with a shaved head smoking herself to death. He went inside and made himself a drink in the kitchen.

  This is not really me. I am not a man who kisses teenage girls, fucks his receptionist, cheats on his wife. The only thing to do was force all this back into whatever crack in his psyche it had crawled out of. Force it back in and go on.

  His wife was calling him. Ray went back outside with his gin and tonic and sat down on the porch steps, watched his wife heap chicken and corn onto paper plates.