Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

The Fainting Room (28 page)

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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“All right,” Evelyn said. “I’d love to.” Ingrid turned her face away and looked out the cab window but not before Evelyn saw the smile hiking up the side of Ingrid’s face.

Ingrid was right, Evelyn thought. She did not want to be sitting here, across from Marseille Yeager in the booth of Szechwan Garden, an upscale place that served dishes you could get for a quarter of the price in Chinatown. They hadn’t even finished their appetizer yet and already Marseille had quizzed her on how she was feeling (“We were worried when you didn’t come to Symphony Hall”), how Ray was managing given all the stress in the office ( “Alex is a wreck from all the changes being made”), and whether she didn’t think chopsticks were superior to forks (“Tapered bamboo is just so much more civilized than this Occidental custom of putting metal prongs in your mouth, don’t you think?”).

When the waiter arrived with their main dishes, he set the food down, refilled their tea, bowed in a way Evelyn suspected was pure flash, and started back toward the kitchen. Evelyn cleared her throat.

“Excuse me?”

The waiter turned.

“I’d like a fork, please. If you have them.”

Marseille blinked. The ghost of Joe Cullen let out a delighted snort. The waiter nodded, poker-faced, and continued toward the kitchen. And Evelyn thought of Ingrid, of the pleasure of telling Ingrid about this later, and had to cover her face with her napkin to hide the grin that was threatening to break into laughter.

16.

Ray continued to stay late at Dunlap and Scott, making sure to arrive home after dinner. He was trying to avoid seeing Ingrid, but he did not want to think of that as the reason, so he pushed his motivation behind another one that had to do with designing a stairwell for a bank’s corporate headquarters. When he was home, he did his best to stay away from her: to say no to walking up to the ridge with binoculars because Saturn was going to be visible, no to helping her solve Detective Arthur Slade’s problems with his crooked clients, no to her offer to play the Scrabble game she’d found in the closet of the fainting room.

This evening he arrived home at quarter to nine, kissed his wife hello, mixed a drink, grabbed some leftovers from the fridge and said he was sorry but he had to go upstairs and keep working. Then he sat in his study with the door closed and the sound of crickets loud through the broken window. Chapter three of
Victorian Architecture: A Treatise
lay written out in longhand on the desk in front of him. He picked up his pen and doodled boxes in the margins.

I am doing the right thing, he reminded himself. It’s my actions that count. I am sitting at my desk with my architecture book in front of me. No one knows I am staring at the matchbook she left on the corner of my desk, thinking of her hands leaving it there, no one knows I am mooning over some teenage girl.

But she is not some teenage girl. She is Ingrid.

In four weeks Newell Academy would reopen for the fall, and Ingrid would pack her iguana and her baby doll with the gas mask on its face, pack her stuffed owl and her ripped black clothes and go back to her dorm. Four weeks and everything would be fine. She’d be five miles away, one town over. Perhaps she’d come for tea now and then, of course she would, just make sure Evelyn was here, but then how could he talk to Ingrid, just talk to her, let her talk, be alone with her, oh this was terrible, what was wrong with him?

Behind him, the door of the study opened.

Ray turned and breathed a sigh of disappointed relief when he saw it was Evelyn.

“We have to take the car to the shop,” Evelyn said. “I keep forgetting to tell you. It doesn’t want to shift between drive and reverse.”

“Was the engine light on?”

“I don’t think so, but it’s the transmission, not the engine.”

“The transmission is part of the engine. It’d be the engine light.” And when Evelyn blushed and looked away, he added, “It’s all right, darling. I don’t expect you to know about car repair.”

“You don’t expect me to know anything,” she said, and went out.

He was messing up, he knew it. There was no reason to patronize his wife, no reason to try to pick a fight with her to assuage his guilty feelings. He would apologize to her later, after he finished going over these drawings.

A minute later, the door opened again. Ray turned, thinking it was Evelyn coming back, but it was Ingrid who stood in the doorway, holding a mug in one hand and a sheaf of typed pages in the other.

“I brought you some tea,” she said.

Tea, Ray thought, the drink of British Royalty and Japanese Zen masters alike. Tea, a perfectly safe thought to be having. A perfectly safe drink to drink.

“Whatcha doing?” Ingrid twisted her head around and read aloud off the legal pad he’d written on. “‘…Evidenced by its prominent chimneys, counterpointing the availability of wood in the American builder’s armamentarium.’” She looked up at him. “‘
Armamentarium
?’ You’re kidding, right?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s wrong with it? Oh, boy.” Ingrid shook her head pityingly. “I can’t help you there. So how about taking a break and helping me instead?”

“Help you do what?” Ray felt irritated, which was a relief; irritation was not attraction.

“Work on our story. You know, Arthur Slade.”

“It’s your story, really,” he said, but his annoyance ebbed at her use of “our.”

“Well, I can’t do it without you,” said Ingrid. “You haven’t been around for days, and I’m stuck.”

“You don’t look stuck.”

I’m busy, go away,
he should be saying. How to say it politely yet firmly, how to make her leave?

“Try the tea,” Ingrid said. “Milk but no sugar. I watched you.”

I’m busy, go away
. But she’d watched him.

He took a sip, made himself say, “Thank you,” and nothing else.

“I need to know what to write next,” Ingrid said. “I did the scene where Arthur Slade goes back to go visit Emily Roseine, just to be sure she isn’t setting him up, and he sees her kissing another guy, remember?”

“I don’t think you showed me that scene.”

“Well, anyway, now is the scene where he confronts her about it. Here, read.”

She thrust several pages toward him. Now, push the pages back, say,
Ingrid, I’m very busy.
Say
, Ingrid, why not go ask Evelyn what she thinks?

But he didn’t want Evelyn to be the one to help her. He wanted to do it; he was the one who had published a detective story, after all. The cup of tea was a bribe, he knew, but no less pleasant for being one.

All right: he would drink his tea while he read what she’d written, which would take five minutes, tops, and then he’d send her off with a new idea and get back to his own work. He took the pages from her.

“Who was that I saw you kissing the other night after I left?” I asked her. “Because it was a hell of a display of affection for a married lady. Unless, of course, that was your husband, in which case he hasn’t been kidnapped after all.”

It was a bad play on my part: it just made her mad. So I didn’t learn anything except that she was even better looking when she was angry.

“You sneak,” she said. “What were you doing, spying on me?”

“I didn’t ask you to give me some phony story about how your husband’s missing and then you get a ransom note thrown through your window that it turns out you wrote yourself.”

She went white around the nose. “You’re a liar, Mr. Slade. And I thought detectives were supposed to be after the truth.”

“Don’t push me,” I said. “What I’m after I usually get.”

“What I’m after I always get,” she breathed. Then she pressed up against me, jamming my gun into my gut like a broken promise.

Ray looked up.

“That’s as far as I got,” Ingrid said. “What kind of gun does our detective have?”

She wore her Dead Kennedys T-shirt and what looked like a pair of men’s boxer shorts with skulls on them. The rest of her was skin. He wanted to touch it, just run his hand lightly over her forearm. He tried to squash the thought. What had she asked him? Gun.

“Whatever kind you want. A Colt? A Luger?”

“Which is better?”

Ray shook his head, amused. Did she really think he could answer the question with any knowledge at all? Was she confusing him with his own fictional hero from long ago? He liked the idea, then felt embarrassed at the conceit.

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Well, what kind would you have if you had one?”

“I wouldn’t have one,” he said. “I might have had a b.b. gun when I was a kid, but that’s the extent of my gun knowledge. My dad didn’t hunt, and I wasn’t in Vietnam. Why can’t you just call it ‘gun’?”

It was not that it was smooth adolescent skin that made him want to touch it. It was that it was
her
skin: it held everything that was Ingrid inside of it, a rare and precious envelope with dirty knees. He made himself look at the ceiling. There was a crack in the plaster near the crown molding.

“But what should I write next?” Ingrid asked.

He looked back at Ingrid, tried to focus on what she’d just asked him.

“You mean, after ‘jamming my gun in my gut like a broken promise?’ Come on, you know the genre. The detective has to push the femme fatale off him and leave. He goes and has a stiff drink to calm down, and then he calls up his buddy who works in homicide and can go through all the old police files for him to see if she has a rap sheet.”

Ingrid frowned. “I think it would be better if the detective just kisses her.”

The papers in Ray’s hand gave an involuntary shake. He put them down on the desk and looked very hard at the floor. Was she speaking to him in code, did she want him to kiss her? Ingrid had twisted one leg around the other, and was slouched against the desk picking a cuticle. Not a particularly suggestive pose. But there was her body, her swimmy mouth, her greenish-black hair with its inch-long sandy roots, and a kind of weight about her, a weight radiating off her like heat, a weight that settled on him like the pressure of an actual body against his, and in a way that made him want to push back, not to push away, but to offer weight in return, as if they were dancing.

“Ingrid, I really need to get back to my work.”

“You could help me with this and then I could help you type your stuff.”

“There won’t be anything to type if I don’t write it first. Now scoot.”

“Don’t you want to just help me with the dialogue for a few minutes?”

“NO,” he said, almost yelling it.

“All right, fine. You’re in a fabulous mood this evening.” She grabbed the papers and went out, slamming the door behind her.

Immediately Ray was filled with remorse, a deep stab of it that opened such confusion of feeling that for a moment he could do nothing but sit there with something enormous and painful trying to break through cage of his chest.

Was it rage, was it lust? No, neither. He did not know what it was. What was wrong with him?

Now Evelyn was standing in the doorway saying something about the car, I can drop you at the train in the morning and take your car that way she was saying. What, he said, and, do we have to talk about this now? She was talking and he was just watching her mouth move, the words all secondary, the garage in Randall better than the one in Newell in her opinion and why did she keep talking at him?

He held up an hand in protest.

“Is it too much to ask that I can work in peace for an hour? I can’t get anything done at all when I’m constantly being interrupted.” He stood up, clutching his papers, and went past her out of the study.

By the time he’d gone the few steps to the top of the stairs he was sorry. Storming out of the room was just childish. He had let himself lose focus: he had an unfinished manuscript and a broken window that needed his attention; these were concrete things that could be made better simply by turning his mind to the problems they posed. Why all this angst over a ridiculous crush on a teenager? If some other man his age, Alex Yeager, say, had jerked off to the image of some teenage girl he’d seen on the subway, he wouldn’t give it a second thought. So what was his problem? Ingrid was a girl who’d come into his life at an odd moment, and next month she would go out of it again and that would be that. His worrying over his feelings for her was probably just an artful bit of procrastination. Well, that would end right now. He would go back to his desk and continue on with
Victorian Architecture
. But first he needed to apologize to his wife.

Evelyn was lying on the bed in her bathrobe reading F
amily Circle
.

“Sweetheart,” Ray said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. That wasn’t like me at all.”

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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