The Fainting Room

by Sarah Pemberton Strong

  “What do you mean, ‘what you did to Ray’?”

  “The rock. You know, the rock that went through the window,” Evelyn added when Ingrid looked blank.

  “You threw it?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “But I thought—you said—I mean, why?”

  “I was angry. Not much of an excuse, is it? I didn’t know I was going to throw it, and I didn’t know Ray was in the study, but the point is that I did throw it, and it grazed his head and I could have killed him. I could have killed two husbands in two years, Ingrid. Ray doesn’t know about the shooting, and I couldn’t tell him about the rock either. And I wouldn’t be telling you now, except that I know you won’t say anything.”

  “Of course I won’t—”

  “—Given that you just shot my husband.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Ingrid said.

  “Didn’t you?” Evelyn raised an eyebrow. “Well, you can wonder about that for the rest of your life. Just like me.” She shook her head. “After I threw the rock I thought, maybe it wasn’t an accident, maybe somehow I knew that Ray was in there. And I was afraid he’d realize it was me who threw it, that he’d come to his senses and see what I was really like. And then what? It seemed like my whole marriage, my whole life with him, could be over just like that. I felt like I was in the center ring under the spotlight and everyone was watching me and I was watching myself and I could feel that I was just about to screw up everything. But then you came along.”

  Ingrid stared.

  “‘And then I came along’? What does that mean?”

  “Just that then I could catch my breath. All the attention wasn’t on me. I guess I felt safer.”

  “That’s why you wanted me to live with you?” Ingrid asked. “To baby-sit your marriage? And is that why you want me here now? To be your fucking babysitter?”

  “Oh, honey, no.” Evelyn reached out and took Ingrid’s hand. Ingrid shook it free.

  “Don’t lie to me anymore.” Ingrid was crying now. “I know you’re lying. Why else would you have wanted someone like me around? I couldn’t figure it out at the time. Ray, I understood—Ray and I had stuff to talk about, but not you, you didn’t seem to like me at all.”

  “Ingrid, just listen a minute. At first, before I ever met you, it was just that I wanted someone else around. I was scared and I didn’t know what else to do. But I didn’t know you would be you. And yesterday when I said I wanted you to keep on living with us, believe me, it had nothing to do with Ray or with me being afraid of what would happen. I wanted—I want you to stay with us because I’ve never had as much fun with anyone as I have with you. You’re my best friend and I love you. That’s why.”

  Ingrid was supposed to get on a plane the day after tomorrow. Leave Evelyn behind and fly two thousand miles away. How could she go on, when this was the case?

  “I can’t live without you,” Ingrid said aloud, and relief and despair flooded through her in twin currents that pulled her down flat on the bed. “I can’t just go to California and never see you again.” She buried her face in the bedspread. “But I can’t stay with you guys anymore, either. Not after this. I don’t know what to do.”

  Hating herself, Ingrid pressed her face into the scratchy polyester. The bedspread grew damp with tears and snot. She imagined suffocating herself right there. A quick end in a crummy hotel room, Mister.

  And then a hand began massaging her back.

  Ingrid felt her body grow rigid with wanting. She stopped crying. She held her breath.

  A second hand joined the first and rubbed Ingrid’s shoulders. Breathe, said Evelyn’s hands on her shoulders. Relax. From the nape of her neck all the way down her spine, a tingling surged over the surface of her skin, filled Ingrid with that crazy electricity. Her whole body was lighting up. Humming. Powered.

  Ingrid rolled over and gazed up at Evelyn. Evelyn’s hair had come loose and hung in a red curtain around her face. Ingrid reached up and tried to make her own hands do what Evelyn’s had done, softly kneading Evelyn’s shoulders, her arms. Then Ingrid’s hands added an idea of their own and pulled Evelyn down onto the bed beside her. Ingrid put her hands on Evelyn’s chest below her collar bone and pushed, gently. Trying to push into Evelyn’s heart an understanding of how important this was.

  Evelyn was still for a moment. Then, in a voice that seemed to be thinking of something else, something nice that had happened a long time ago, she spoke. Her voice was so soft that Ingrid caught only the tone, not the words. Ingrid moved her head closer to Evelyn’s, until her ear was right beside Evelyn’s mouth. “Say it again?” she asked.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Evelyn whispered.

  Ingrid closed her eyes and put her arms around Evelyn. Felt Evelyn’s arms copy the gesture. She was holding, she was being held, and the feel of Evelyn was pressed against every cell of the palms of her hands. Ingrid slid her lucky fingers up Evelyn’s spine, laced them through her hair, and then moved her head and found Evelyn’s opening mouth.

  Oh, at last, at last.

  Kissing was not the word for it; she was dying and living for the first time. Her mouth mixing with Evelyn’s was all there was inside the dark universe behind her eyelids. The swollen break in Evelyn’s lower lip, the salty taste of blood; the sweet perfection of Evelyn’s top lip, the pressure of Evelyn’s breasts against her chest, the heat of them, she was drowning in tiger-colored hair and sweet tongue, she was fumbling at Evelyn’s buttons until Evelyn found her hands and held them still. Laid them aside. Ingrid opened her eyes, froze in a blur of terror that all this might come to an end.

  “Some softness,” Evelyn said, more to herself, as if she were contemplating a new flavor of ice cream. “Some softness would be nice.” She twitched each button from its buttonhole and slid out of her blouse.

  And just as all the tattoos finally became visible to Ingrid—the sun, the tiger, the carp and the lilies, the rainbow, the butterflies the heart, the mermaid curled around Evelyn’s navel—Ingrid found that she no longer cared about seeing them. Not now. As the sun’s orange rays splayed out across Evelyn’s sternum and disappeared beneath the cups of her bra, Ingrid sat up on her knees and bent her head in supplication. Slid the lacy straps off Evelyn’s shoulders. In the midst of all there was to look at, Ingrid closed her eyes. At last, she kissed her way to the heart of her nuclear reaction. To the fusion at the center of the sun.

  In the bed on the other side of the thin motel wall, Ray awoke in the darkness to a sound he knew well. It was a sound he should not have been hearing: the sound of his wife making love. But his wife was not beside him, and the bed he was lying in was not his bed. His brain, too fatigued by alcohol poisoning to make sense of the contradiction, allowed him to roll over and fall back to sleep. The next time he awakened, everything was quiet except the pain in his own body and he did not remember the earlier sounds.

  She woke up in the night, Mister. She was still in my arms and she stirred there. Then stayed there, sweet-smelling flesh in that stale room.

  “I’ll take you up on it,” she said dreamily. “I’ll go away with you. To California.”

  “You will?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “For a week,” she said. “We’ll do all those things you told me about, rent a car and drive around and stuff. I need to get away from here for a while.”

  “That would be great,” was all I said. But then I lay awake the rest of the night, dreaming of what we’d do. A week would be just the beginning.

  In the frail darkness that only has an hour left to live before dawn kills it, she woke again. Actually, I woke her. I was so excited.

  “I have an idea,” I said. She laid her head on my chest and I stroked her hair.

  “What’s your idea,” she asked. Her voice, Mister. Dreamy with sleep. Even her voice got me.

  “When we get to California, we’ll just stay there,” I told her. “You’ll leave him. Come with me to live. We’ll get
a place in Hollywood, just like you’ve always wanted. A little bungalow, say.”

  I’d got it all worked out. She’d open a tattoo parlor that was also a nail salon. I’d have my office on the floor above, where I’d see clients and take cases and stuff.

  “Sounds wonderful,” she said sleepily. She nestled her head on my shoulder.

  I was so happy, so deliriously happy, that I was laughing while I said it and then she laughed too.

  In the darkness she had a full, easy laugh that rang out in the air of that crummy room like the pealing of bells.

  27.

  The curtains on the Lone Pine Motel’s windows had been new twenty years ago. Now, the light-blocking fabric was disintegrating. Evelyn woke to a pinholes of light that seemed to have been run through a strainer. She opened her eyes and surveyed the outlines of where she was. Ingrid asleep next to her, curled like a comma beside the exclamation point she suddenly found herself in: Last night! Ingrid!

  It had been just as she would have imagined making love to Ingrid would be, had she ever imagined such a thing, which she had not: soft and tough and delightful and weird, all at the same time. There was Ingrid’s rough-shaven head and Ingrid’s smooth body, all that smooth skin—it had soothed her, eased her, caressed her down into an altered state of peaceful release. Taught her that anything could still happen after all.

  But that was last night. In the darkness of last night in a strange motel room, what they had done could be a thing unto itself, a private act that did not need to carry any meaning beyond the hours it had lasted. But Evelyn knew that once she pulled back the curtains and Ingrid woke up, it would start to get complicated.

  She had needed that love and returned it gratefully, but now it was morning and she had the rest of her life to deal with, beginning with the man asleep on the other side of the wall.

  She opened the door quietly so as not to wake Ingrid and went next door to number twenty-two. Ray was still asleep as well. From the towels hung over the chair beside him and his clothes piled on the floor, she gathered that he had woken up once already and taken a shower and then got back in bed. That was good. That was not something Joe would ever do.

  But as soon as she thought this, she was struck by the irrelevancy of comparing the two men. Something had changed in the night. What was it? There was an ease, a release she was feeling that was new. What was different? Evelyn sat down on the edge of the bed, got up again, paced a bit. She hung the towels back on the towel racks and threw away a washcloth caked with dried blood. She washed her face, inspected her swollen lip and ran her hands through her hair in place of a comb. Then she sat down beside Ray’s sleeping body and realized what had changed.

  She had forgiven him. Without going down the checklist of wrongs—the affair with Joanne, quitting his job, lying to her, going on a binge drunk—she had forgiven him, for something more than these, something that both encompassed the list and rendered it meaningless. She had forgiven him for not having saved her. When she married him, she had truly believed that their union would unify her, that he would bind up all her old wounds and care for her until they had healed. It had not happened, and it was not his fault. He had given her what she’d wished for, security and space; and he had given her what she had not even dreamed of as well—he had given her love. Love mixed, perhaps, with a subtle need to mold her, as she had tried to mold herself, into a citizen of his world, but it was love nonetheless. And it had not been enough.

  She did not feel ready to know this, sitting in a dumb motel in the middle of nowhere, but there it was.

  Evelyn stood up, feeling lost. She unwrapped the bathroom drinking glass from its paper wrapper and turned on the tap, swallowed some chlorine-tasting water. Then opened the door and stood in the doorway, feeling the beginnings of the morning. The air on her face was fresh with last night’s rain, and cool.

  Then the door of number twenty-one opened, and Ingrid came out. She was dressed but barefoot, bed-rumpled, her face broken open by a grin.

  “Well, there you are, Evelyn.” Wide open, Ingrid’s face was astonishingly young this morning, her brown eyes shining, her round cheeks flushed from sleep.

  “Hey. Good morning.” Evelyn tried a smile that didn’t come out so well. Ingrid didn’t notice. Ingrid wanted to kiss her again, right here, right now. Evelyn felt a sharp stab of guilt. She had not counted on this.

  Behind her, in Ray’s room, the bedsprings creaked. Their voices had woken him up. Evelyn stepped all the way out of the cabin and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Ingrid gazed up at Evelyn. “You want some coffee?” she asked. “We can get some coffee in the office, I bet.”

  “Not now. Ray’s awake. I need to talk to you first.”

  “So talk.” Ingrid leaned against the fake log front of the cabin and linked her arm through Evelyn’s. Happiness radiated from her skin, it glazed her eyes.

  Evelyn slid her arm free again. “Ingrid. The things that happened last night, I don’t want you to think—”

  “I’m not thinking,” Ingrid said. “I’m just enjoying.”

  “I mean what happened with you and me. I don’t want you to think we’re—I mean, I guess we’d both been through a lot yesterday, you know? You’re my friend, we’re friends. But it doesn’t mean—” she broke off. Ingrid’s face had shut like a door. The happy grin was gone and a little wry smile had taken its place. She looked at Evelyn and nodded. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

  Then the door behind Evelyn opened and there was Ray, blinking in the morning light.

  “I’ll just go put my shoes on,” Ingrid said, and ducked back in the other room.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” I told her, and Mister, I was lying. But I would have said anything as long as she was still coming with me to California. I knew she’d said she’d only stay a week, but in my mind I saw us there for good. We’d get a place together, leave the past behind us, and sooner or later I’d make her love me. She was just scared, I thought, but I’d calm her down. That’s what I was thinking. I was out of my mind, I know. But that’s how powerful the secret formula turned out to be. Not X-onium. Sex-onium, Mister. I’d been radiated with it and now it was in my body forever. I had underestimated what it could do, the way it lit me up from inside and changed my very atoms. The way it split me and made me think I needed her if I was going to be whole.

  I didn’t even know my own name anymore.

  Then he came out of the motel room, her husband.

  Did she know what he’d done, how he’d tried to sell Axtex’s secrets to somebody else? I still don’t know the answer to that one. I didn’t ask her. Her husband came out, and then there wasn’t time for her to say whatever words she’d plan ned to use to break my heart.

  Instead we all got in the car and drove back to civilization. No one looked any one else in the eye or said very much and everyone kept to their own side of the sedan.

  An Oldsmobile Cutlass is a big car, Mister. I sat in the back seat and felt like I was the only person left alive in the whole world.

  Evelyn had thrown the mail onto the foyer table without looking at it, but Ingrid saw the fat envelope at once, sticking out between The New Yorker and the Sears catalog. A blue United Airlines logo on the corner.

  She opened it in her bedroom. A one-way ticket leaving tomorrow, Mister. I tossed it on the floor. It was just a piece of paper.

  But another piece of paper could be made into a ticket with Evelyn’s name on it, and another could be created so that Ingrid could return to Newell Academy. But not to this house. After yesterday there was no way she could come back to this house. It was the scene of too many crimes.

  Ingrid surveyed the mess on the floor—the records and books, the stuffed owl, the doll in the gas mask, Melvin and his terrarium. She wasn’t sure she could get it all packed in one day, but if she stayed in her room and tried, she wouldn’t have to talk to Ray. The man who had seen who she was and
understood her like no one else in her life, a man she had kissed in the afternoon and shot in the evening, a man she loved and was disgusted by. She knew how long he liked his tea steeped, his favorite piano concertos, the contents of his closets and the taste of his lips. She knew how his wife made love.

  Ingrid retrieved the plane ticket from the floor and studied the jumble of red printing. The flight was for 10:00 the next morning. If Evelyn was really coming with her, she’d better get busy. There was a ticket to buy, a suitcase to pack, a husband to deal with.

  Down the hall, Ray set aside the dry toast Evelyn had brought him and eased himself over to the foot of the bed so he could look in the mirror and inspect the damage.

  His left eye had swollen halfway shut where his wife had punched him, the upper lid pinkish purple, a darker bruise below. His head ached with the hangover, his stomach muscles ached from throwing up, and the top of his shoulder throbbed where Ingrid had shot him. Looking in the mirror, he peeled back the bandage. The gash was an inch long, an eighth of an inch deep.

  I took a bullet.

  Combined with the black eye, it made him look tough. A tough guy at last. In the mirror he saw himself smile. But the only person who would have appreciated it was Ingrid. At the thought of her, he felt a sharp twinge of pain. Not from the headache or his shoulder, but something deeper that would last long after the other injuries had healed. The nick from the bullet would leave a scar, but not a large one. He hoped he had not scarred Ingrid any worse than that.

  Then there was Evelyn. When she’d brought him the toast, she hadn’t seemed angry, though he was not sure how that could be possible. She’d sat with him for a moment without saying anything, but the silence was not pointed, not dangerous. She just seemed thoughtful, and tired.