Evelyn was crying now in earnest but he felt completely unmoved. In his sudden drunkenness it seemed to him that he had sacrificed his job, his job, to prove to Evelyn that he loved her, and now she was furious at him for it.
“Is she beautiful? Can she cook French food? Is she so much smarter than me, is that it?”
Ray pushed back his chair and stood up, swaying. “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” he said thickly.
“Like what? Like what? I’m not the one who cheated. I’m not the one who just quit his goddamn job. And I’m not the one who’s drunk. You’re drunk, Ray.” She was crying so hard she was gasping. “You’re fucking drunk. I don’t even know who you are anymore, so just get out of here. Get out of here before I kill you.”
“You shouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “That’s crazy.”
She sank back in her chair and dropped her eyes. “Just go,” she said more quietly. “With your drunk breath and your flapping hands. Just get out of my sight.”
He went. Outside he got into his car and fumbled getting the key into the ignition, dropped it on the floor, tried again. When he’d got the car started, he looked up and saw Ingrid walking across the lawn toward the house. He rolled down the window and spoke to her.
“Your father called last night,” he said.
She waited. Ray took a breath, exhaled bourbon fumes. “We agreed that you should get to California as rapidly as possible. He’s booked you a flight on Saturday. The tickets should be here tomorrow.”
Without waiting for an answer, he let out the clutch and the Saab coasted out of the driveway.
Navigating the road, he felt for himself what Evelyn must have seen looking at him in the kitchen—that he was much drunker than he’d thought. Making the sharp curve before the train station, he misjudged the point at which he should begin turning and nearly drove into the guard rail. The flood of adrenaline that went through him gave him a transitory moment of clear-headedness, and at the bottom of the hill he pulled into the commuter rail parking lot and stopped the car. Looked out across the tracks and saw with dismay and a fierce burning thrill that the Olds was coming down the hill after him. And it was not Evelyn driving it, but Ingrid. She parked behind him and slammed out of the car, yanked open the Saab’s passenger door.
“What the hell are you doing driving that car?” Ray said.
“What the hell do you mean that I’m booked on a flight on Saturday?” she shot back. “As in, this is Wednesday and in three days it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to just go?”
Ray closed his eyes and leaned back against the headrest. “It’s the best thing,” he said.
Ingrid flung herself into the passenger seat. “Why is it the best thing? Tell me what I did that makes me such a loser around here all of a sudden. Is it because I kissed you, by mistake, when I was crying? Do you think I’m trying to get you away from Evelyn or something?”
Ray looked at her. Was that what she believed he thought? Ingrid had no idea, none at all.
“Because I’m not, Ray, I just want to stay here with you guys, and everything was going fine until you started all this with me, and now Evelyn says you’re fooling around with some woman at your job or something, so how come I’m the one getting sent away?”
He would tell her. Then at least she’d understand. His tongue, loosened by liquor, could say it.
“I love you,” he said. There. The dirty truth.
Ingrid began to cry. “And I love you, too,” she wept. “And I —I love Evelyn. And I don’t want to go back to Melvin. I just can’t. Please don’t make me.”
“You misunderstand,” his tongue said. Oh, to kiss her! “Ingrid. Not agape but eros. I mean I’m in love with you.”
Ingrid looked over at him. He noted that she did not like what she saw.
“Jesus, Ray.”
He nodded. “I’m in love with you and you’re sixteen years old.”
Ingrid seemed to shrink against the passenger side door.
“And that’s why you want me to go?”
He nodded again. “I’m sorry. Don’t hate me, please.”
She chewed on her lip. There was a short silence and then a roar as a train flew through Randall Crossing without stopping.
“Jesus,” she said again.
She had not expected this. It was like something in a movie, and not the kind of movie she liked. And then she was furious with him. She wanted to shove him against the dashboard, throw him out of the car, she hated him, he was an idiot. If what she felt for Evelyn was what Ray felt for her, Ingrid, then that was terrible. She would have to be as tall as the house, as long as a train, to satisfy such a desire; it was impossible.
“I’m so sorry,” Ray said. “I never meant for this to happen. But it has, and so you have to go. And then maybe that part of me will just die and I’ll be all right again.”
Beside him in the car, Ingrid drew her knees up to her chest to keep from kicking him. Why didn’t he just shut up and let things go back to the way they were? It would have been the simplest thing in the world for him to call her father and tell him she couldn’t come back to Melvin, but instead he was sitting here telling her he was in love with her and ruining everything.
She took a breath and tried to make her voice come out sounding calm.
“Look,” she said, “let’s just forget this. Let’s just put things back the way they were before this week. Okay?”
Ray shook his head no.
“But what do you think is going to happen? That I’ll break up your marriage or something? Look, I won’t tell Evelyn you kissed me, or—or how you said you feel about me. It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal. You’re still a child.”
“I am not a child. Jeez, first my dad, then Linda, and now you—”
“All right, I’m sorry. You’re not a child. Obviously you’re not a child.”
“I can’t go back to California, Ray.”
Ray turned away from her and looked out the window. Then his shoulders began to shake and Ingrid realized he was crying without making any noise. It was just how Evelyn had been sitting the night before, crying in the driver’s seat in just this same way.
Then Ingrid knew what she had to do. She reached out her arm and draped it across Ray’s shoulders, just as she had done with Evelyn the night before. She leaned toward him, holding her breath, then let it out as she put her lips against his cheek. It was smooth, smelled of that spicy shaving cream smell she’d always liked.
You can do this, Slade. Ray’s your friend.
She kissed his cheek again and felt him turning toward her.
Hold still, Slade. Don’t move a muscle.
But then his mouth was on her mouth and his mouth tasted sour with hunger and she couldn’t help it, she jerked back, away from him.
Ray groaned, passed his hand over his face. Then he reached across her and opened the passenger side door.
“Get out. Out. Right now.”
She did. She stood on the gravel of the parking lot and stared at him a moment, hugging her arms around herself. Then she turned and walked back to the Olds and got in. Started the engine. Backed up as if she’d been doing it all her life, and drove back up the hill.
He watched her go, then pulled the car door shut and put his head in his hands to muffle his sobs.
24.
Ingrid shook as she drove up the hill. She wanted to leave her skin behind and drive away from it, it felt so dirty. Even the sweat running down her chest inside her tee shirt felt corrosive.
I was a bloody mess. I spit the sand out of my mouth and tried to sit up. It wasn’t a good idea. Sitting up made the saguaros and sagebrush spin like a carnival ride. I felt the back of my head and tried to remember who’d hit me, and how I’d gotten out here among the lizards and the cactus. Slowly it came back to me.
My client, the one with the fancy hanky and the ironed c-notes, had picked me up last night the way we’d arranged. A mistake, going in his ca
r. He’d driven me out to the desert, down dark roads with no lights or signs. We drove through a chain link fence with barbed wire whose gate had been left open, as if someone was expecting us. We got out of the car and stood there in the dark, waiting. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it. But I had gone along nice as you please.
When Ingrid reached the house, she ran inside and got into the shower with all her clothes on. She stood beneath water as hot as she could stand it. Then she peeled off her tee shirt and cutoffs and soaped her body, hating it, not looking down.
Out there in the middle of nowhere there were too many stars overhead. Then all of a sudden the roar of a fighter plane ripped the night in half, tore the sky with more sound than it seemed that silent desert could hold. The plane was flying so low I ducked. And then three things happened at once. I realized where I’d been driven—we were in the old Axtex bombing range, a forsaken place where the Axtex Company tested their new missiles while the Feds looked the other way. I also realized who my client really was—he was none other than Emily Roseine’s husband, the president of Axtex. The secret formula he was trading, X-onium, was his own company’s nuclear secrets. It would have been nice if somebody had given me a medal for realizing all this. But the third thing that happened was that somebody knocked me out.
Ingrid felt a little better after the shower. She got dressed, clamped her fedora over her bald head, and found a ballpoint pen in Ray’s desk. Then she went out to the sun porch where Evelyn kept her sewing basket and got a needle and thread. Evelyn didn’t seem to be around. In the kitchen she took a swig from the bottle of bourbon Ray had left open on the kitchen table. She broke the ballpoint pen in half, wrapped the thread around the needle and dipped the needle into the ink.
The ink was too gloppy; Ingrid poured a little water over the pen and tried again. That was better; the ink soaked the thread and held itself there, one bead of black descending to the tip of the needle and then beneath Ingrid’s skin where it settled into the home it would have for the rest of her life. The pinpricks felt like little electric shocks, or little jumps in space, something that moved her somewhere different from where she was, a little further away each time the needle pressed down into her forearm.
She enlarged the dot, not thinking of anything, not sure what she would make. Then added a second dot right beside the first one, their edges touching. She reloaded the thread with ink and needled a third dot bumping up against the other two, stopping only to wipe the ink and a little blood from her arm. Now it was clear to her what she was inking. She added more dots until she had a round cluster the size of her little fingernail. Then she began inking the first line, a thin oblong that orbited the cluster.
The kitchen door swung open and Evelyn came in. Ingrid didn’t look up. Ingrid with the needle in her hand, the pinpoints of blood and ink on her arm.
Evelyn didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she sat down beside Ingrid.
“Joe Cullen is rolling over in his grave,” Evelyn said finally.
“That I should be the source of a jailhouse tattoo? Joe is rolling right over.”
Ingrid looked up then, scanned Evelyn’s face. “Are you mad?”
“I have no energy left to be mad with.” She sighed. “First Ray fucks his secretary and then he quits his job. He just quits. He has no job now.”
“Can we not talk about Ray?” Ingrid asked. “I really, really don’t feel like talking about Ray. Or about me going back to Melvin. Or about anything.” She went back to her needling. “I just want to do this.”
Evelyn held out her hand. “Give me that needle.”
“I’m not done yet.”
“Oh, yes you are. Hand it over.”
“It’s too late, I’m already tattooed.” Ingrid hunched over her arm.
Evelyn sighed again. She thought she had never felt so exhausted. “Come on, Ingrid, stop. I mean it.”
“You don’t want me going through life with half a tattoo, do you?”
Evelyn felt something inside her give up. Here she was in her Dream Life kitchen, her Dream Life husband having become, overnight, a cheating, unemployed drunk. And now she was watching a sixteen-year-old stick a sewing needle into her arm.
The ghost of Joe Cullen was standing beside her now, and she felt him smile, a good face for a change. He saw the humor in it, she knew. He had been someone who’d gone to the lowest point life could bring you and still been able to laugh. She had admired that.
Go ahead, he nodded to her, and a flash of the man Joe had once been flared in the kitchen like lightning and was gone.
Evelyn nodded slowly back at Ingrid, at her half-finished arm.
“If you’re already tattooed,” she said, “we’re going to do it right. For once in our stinking lives, we are going to do one lousy thing the right way.” She put her hand over Ingrid’s to stop her from doing any more. “Forget the sewing needle. We’ll do it pro.”
Ingrid felt Evelyn’s hand seeping warmth into hers. But she wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
“Pro?” she repeated.
“Go up to the junk room—the fainting room,” Evelyn said.
“In the closet there’s a black leather case that looks like a little suitcase. Bring it down.”
Ingrid went. She’d seen the black case before and tried to open it, but it had a combination lock. From the way the contents had moved when she shook the case—rattling, but well-padded—she’d imagined it contained a set of silverware.
She’d been wrong. Evelyn spun the numbers and snapped the catch open and Ingrid looked down at the small jars of ink in their holders, the long shining needles, the ink cups and the tattoo machine itself, which was shaped like a revolver whose barrel was a pen. Anything could happen after all. If Evelyn was going let her give herself a real tattoo, anything at all was possible.
Anything, Mister.
Evelyn lifted out a small metal box with a gauge on the front of it.
“What’s that?” Ingrid asked.
“The power supply.” Evelyn plugged the box into the wall outlet and the tattoo machine into the box.
“It looks like a Geiger counter,” Ingrid said.
“A what?”
“For measuring radiation.” She looked at the tattoo machine. “So how do I hold it?”
“You don’t. I’m doing it. If you do it yourself, it’ll look like crap. Now what is this thing you’re putting on yourself?”
“It’s an atom. A lithium atom.”
“An atom?” Evelyn started to object, but the ghost of Joe Cullen was practically yelling at her: Never try to talk a customer out of a design.
“All right, then.” Evelyn reached into the case and handed Ingrid a purple magic marker. “You better draw it on your arm first, since I have no idea what an atom looks like.”
“Sure you do.” Ingrid drew another electron ring and then a third one, added a dot to each ring, and Evelyn realized that Ingrid was right—she did recognize the symbol.
“These dots are electrons,” Ingrid said. “A lithium atom has three electrons, and they orbit the nucleus, which is this cluster here.”
“Isn’t lithium what they give to mental patients?”
“Lithium is what the first nuclear reaction was done with,” Ingrid said.
Evelyn unscrewed ajar of ink and poured a little into a tiny plastic cup that was part of the tattoo machine. “I’m going to do it in black, since that’s what you started in,” she said.
“Black will be fine,” said Ingrid.
She watched Evelyn fit the needle into the machine. When the needle touched her arm she gasped. This was what it must have felt like when the tiger’s claw tore through Evelyn’s arm. The sudden hot searing, the slow dragging rip. Her body buzzed vibrating with the machine in Evelyn’s hand and then the pain endorphins kicked in, and alongside the agony, something lovely began to course through her, something slow and delicious and sweet. Mister, she was marking me forever.
Ingrid closed her
eyes.
Evelyn bent over Ingrid’s arm. She’d only used the kit once before, and that was years ago, to touch up one of Joe’s tattoos after a knife fight had scarred it. But she had watched Joe ink her so many times that holding the tattoo machine felt natural, as if she’d absorbed its movements through its long relationship with her own skin. She went slowly, first re-inking what Ingrid had done, because that part was the easiest. Then she moved to the long oblongs of the electrons’ orbits. She was nervous about these; if her hand shook, it would show.
Her hand didn’t shake. Perhaps it was her training as a manicurist. She was steady and perfect.
As she inked, she found herself trying to picture this Joanne, imagined her looking twenty-five, not forty, and blonde, with clear, freckle-less skin like a new ream of paper no one had ever scribbled on. But the image was banal and she knew it; it would not hold even in her imagination, it came apart like wet Kleenex. She was done with crying. Things happened in a marriage, any marriage, and this wasn’t like when she was with Joe.
But wasn’t it? Ray drunk and screwing other women, Evelyn smashing windows. Violence and infidelity, her old friends.
Ingrid let out a little sigh of pain and Evelyn realized how quiet she’d been up to now. She lifted the needle off Ingrid’s arm. “You okay?”
Ingrid opened her eyes and looked down at her arm. “Oh,” she said softly. The nucleus at the center, the orbital rings around it. “Wow.” Her eyes went to Evelyn, to her arm, to Evelyn again.
“You like it so far?” Evelyn asked.
Ingrid looked at her forearm again. Her atom. Both the Big Bang and the Earth’s oceans contained lithium. And batteries and nuclear fuel. And drugs to make your mind stop turning against you. Only three electrons, but with so much power contained in them. And now it was hers. Proof of what was inside her.
I had the secret formula, Mister. Me.
“Evelyn.” Ingrid looked up, euphoric. “It looks awesome. I never knew you knew how to do this.”
“I guess I do.” It must be contagious, what Ingrid was feeling; Evelyn felt a burst of energy course through her that had nothing to do with the agony of the last two days. Ingrid’s eyes were spotlights and crowds cheering. Evie Lynne Shepard can give tattoos! The ghost of Joe Cullen was enjoying this. He was rocking back and forth on his heels, he was bouncing up and down, he was practically crowing.
The Fainting Room Page 28