The Fainting Room (36 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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“Where did you get this?” Ray asked.
“Is that all you can fucking say? ‘Where did you get this?’ On the floor of your car, you bastard. Who is she?”
Ray shook his head. His mouth was dry. In the summertime he always left the windows of his car cracked open. Joanne must have gone into the parking garage and slipped in the note. Explanations and apologies burst in his mouth like spoiled grapes; the truest thing he could think of to say was
It’s not what you think,
but what Evelyn was thinking was that he had slept with this note-writing woman, so “it’s not what you think” was not true after all.
“You can’t do this,” Evelyn said. Her voice was low and level. It frightened him. If she had cried or yelled, at least he would have felt he was in navigable territory.
“You can’t do this,” she repeated. “I can’t do this again. Not after Joe. Ray, you are married to me.”
He took a breath. “Evelyn, I am so, so sorry. It happened once. Yesterday. I wanted to tell you, but I thought—”
“Who is she, some architect?”
“She’s the receptionist. I’ve known her for years and I’ve never felt anything for her, and I don’t now. There’s never been the slightest—”
“The
receptionist
? So what is this? Am I just like, part of some
thing
you have for low-wage women? Who else is there? You got a cleaning lady somewhere, too?
“Evelyn, that’s crazy. Please listen to me.” But what was he going to say? I fucked her because I can’t fuck Ingrid? “Joanne doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said. “I can’t explain why it happened—maybe it’s some kind of midlife crisis. I know that sounds terrible and it’s not an excuse, but I’m saying I don’t know. Maybe I think I don’t deserve you and on some level I’m trying to sabotage it.”
Where had that come from, he wondered. Was there a chance that it was true?
“Spare me Marseille’s psychobabble bullshit,” Evelyn said. She took a deep breath and pressed her hands to her sides, as if she were afraid they might fly out and strike him. After a moment she continued, speaking almost under her breath. “I want you to go into work tomorrow and tell Dunlap you need a different receptionist. Tell him you can’t work with her anymore, that he’ll have to move her somewhere else.”
“Evelyn, that’s not necessary. Believe me, it was crazy that this happened even once. There’s no way it will ever happen again.”
“I didn’t marry you so you could screw around on me,” she said hoarsely. “I don’t need to sit here every minute while you’re at work wondering what you’re doing, if you’re fucking her again. You think I’m so desperate that I’ll just take it? That you can do whatever you want? I don’t need you that much—” Evelyn broke off and turned away from him. Out of her body came a long guttural sound of pain that Ray had never in his life caused any woman to make, no girlfriend, not his mother.
He stood up behind her and touched her shoulder. She jerked away.
“Please,” he said louder. “Please, Evelyn. I love you and I would never leave you. Please look at me. I love you. Please.” She turned, raised her head for just a moment—he saw her mouth contorted in a shape that did not seem to belong to her—and, having made some snap assessment of him, she turned away again and went into the house. He followed her, caught her in the foyer.
“I will not do this again,” she said, speaking very slowly as if he were an uncomprehending child. “So find someone else to type your letters for you or whatever the fuck she does. Find a way to get rid of her, move her, fire her, whatever—or else I’ll leave. You’re a bright boy, you’ll figure something out. Don’t bother talking to me again until you have, you shit. That’s fucking all.”
She went out of the house and got back in the Saab, backed up fast and sloppy, then turned out onto the street, barreled past the stop sign and was gone.
22.
 
Ingrid bicycled without direction, headlong into dusk as if darkness would save her. She could taste already the dust of Melvin, California, the dust that gathered at the edges of the artificial lawns and pink gravel, the dust that worked its way into her hair and under her nails. She could feel her soul shriveling up in the dust of that landscape where red meant not Evelyn’s hair but polluted sunsets and brush fires. Where the circus never came to town. If she had to go back to Melvin, California and live with her father and Linda and Melanie, the person she would become was not anyone she even wanted to know. As Ingrid pedaled toward the Post Road on the far side of Randall Common, Ray’s Saab passed her and stopped on the shoulder just ahead. Ingrid skidded to a stop and turned the bike around, intending to ride back in the other direction. She didn’t want to hear another one of Ray’s apologies. But it was Evelyn who stuck her head out the window and called her name.
Evelyn by herself, Evelyn crying, raw, wet gasps. Ingrid got off her bike and climbed into the car. Evelyn’s face was dissolving, misshapen by sobs. Ingrid had never seen Evelyn cry at all, and this crying, so hard it didn’t even look like Evelyn anymore, raised goose bumps on her arms.
“He fucked some woman, some other woman,” Evelyn managed.
Ingrid went cold. Evelyn had found out she and Ray kissed. Oh, why had she kissed him? How had it happened, how had she opened that flood of desire in him? She truly hadn’t meant to, but how could she ever explain that? Her insides were trying to climb out of her body. She might as well kill herself right now.
“He fucked his secretary.” Evelyn was sobbing, her head pressed against the steering wheel.
She, Ingrid, was the secretary, the typist.
How fast would we have to be driving this car for me to jump out and die doing it? And if I didn’t die right away, would she lean over me? Would she touch me one last time?
“I found a note she wrote him,” Evelyn said.
What note was this? Was it something from her story?
Evelyn raised her head from the wheel and Ingrid saw the imprint of circles from the leather in her forehead.
“He doesn’t look like the kind of guy, does he,” Evelyn said.
“He looks like a nice upstanding guy who does what he’s supposed to do and doesn’t fuck around and loves his wife.”
“What did the note say?” Ingrid whispered.
“Just some bullshit about wanting to see him again. His secretary, can you believe that? Some bitch named Joanne.”
“Joanne?” Ingrid sat back in her seat. Joanne? Evelyn was not talking about stupid teenage Ingrid kissing Ray in his study after all. Evelyn’s tears were not Ingrid’s fault.
Detective Slade leaned over and draped one arm around Evelyn’s shoulders.
Mister, there’s one thing I can’t stand to see. A dame crying when a guy’s just left heel marks all over her heart.
Ingrid could hardly breathe. Detective Slade made Ingrid’s fingers move softly along Evelyn’s shoulder to the back of Evelyn’s neck, and then slide beneath Evelyn’s hair to stroke the nape of her neck. The downy skin there was as intimate as a bird’s nest, hidden and fragile. Ingrid watched in amazement as Detective Slade buried Ingrid’s face in Evelyn’s hair. Kissed the top of Evelyn’s ear. Her ear was hot, her hair sweet and heavy.
“I love you,” Detective Slade said. “It’s okay.”
Evelyn gulped tears and let her head rest against Ingrid’s shaved one. She found Ingrid’s hand and held it, gripped it because she was turning upside down, she was on a sick carny ride: her relationship with Ray had suddenly become the madness of her marriage to Joe. For years Joe had fucked around, at the end with whores—by then he’d gone so far downhill Evelyn supposed no woman would to sleep with him unless she got paid.
She raised her head from Ingrid’s shoulder and looked at the inlaid wood on the Saab’s dashboard, the fancy dials, the leather-covered steering wheel. Ray, of all people. Honorable, upstanding, clean-smelling Ray. Ray who opened doors for her, who had gone to fancy schools, who designed buildings that won awards. Was it so foolish to have believed that those things had conferred some kind of protection against the kind of life she’d wanted so badly to escape? Ray who had rescued her. He did not do things like sleep with his secretary. And, she realized, it was not even the cheating that was the worst. It was that it was so unlike him. That was what was making her feel like the floor had dropped out from under her.
She turned to Ingrid. “Have you got any money?” she asked.
Ingrid shook her head. “Not on me. But I have my typing wages back in my room. Why?”
“I thought maybe I could go to a motel or something. I don’t want to go home. But I just ran out here without my purse.”
“I could sneak back inside and get it for you,” Ingrid said.
Evelyn managed a smile. “You’re sweet, you know that? No, it’s all right. I’ll drop you off and then, I don’t know, maybe I’ll just sit here in the car awhile.”
“I don’t want to go back to the house either,” said Ingrid. “Let’s just drive around.”
Evelyn shook her head. “I don’t think I can really drive anywhere. I feel too shaky.”
“I’ll drive us around,” Ingrid said.
“You?”
“I did okay the other day, didn’t I? At Paragon Park?”
“Yeah. In first gear in a parking lot, no one could touch you.”
In the dim purple dusk Evelyn saw Ingrid smile her one-sided smile. “So show me second gear,” Ingrid said. “Come on, you said yourself that once I had the clutch figured out, the rest was easy.”
Let Ingrid drive Ray’s Saab around in the dark? “Oh, why the fuck not,” Evelyn said. Ingrid could crash it for all she cared. “Put your bike in the trunk,” she said. “I hope its tires are muddy.”
Once Ingrid had gotten the car started and in gear, Evelyn settled into the passenger seat. She switched on the radio, but it was tuned to some classical station of course, and at the first strains of violin, she shut it off again. “Fuck that,” she said.
“Let me,” said Ingrid. She fiddled with the dial, and suddenly the car was filled with something loud and violent, something driving forward hard, the sound of boys not so much singing as screaming and the same drumbeat over and over, harder and more insistent than Evelyn’s own stressed-out heartbeat, and the earsplitting effect was that she couldn’t feel her own heart so painfully anymore.
“What the hell is that?” Evelyn had to raise her voice to be heard over the screaming.
Ingrid turned onto the Post Road and shifted successfully into third. “It’s hardcore. Like it?”
“It kind of takes the edge off,” Evelyn said, and Ingrid laughed, accelerated.
Evelyn leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. The voices thrashing out of the radio were so buried in guitars and drums that she couldn’t make out what they were saying, but the pain it seemed to be causing them to say it was so sharp that it bored through her and made a hole where some of the privacy of what she felt, the humiliating shame of it, seemed to leak out and join the general pain of the vocalists’ screaming. The noise filled the car so completely that she found she was able to just listen and feel it pour through her without having to think.
Ingrid drove to the base of Swan Hill, where kids from Newell went to get drunk. She parked at the reservoir and they sat in the dark car, listening to the hardcore show on the college radio station and looking out at the black water. When the hour ended and the announcer’s voice came on, Evelyn shut off the radio.
“I told Ray, it’s either her or me,” Evelyn said. “You don’t think he’d actually leave me, do you?”
“Of course not,” Ingrid said, not because she had any idea what Ray would or would not do now, but because it was what Evelyn wanted to hear. And yet the thought of Evelyn without Ray, the thought of Evelyn all alone sent a dark, guilty thrill through her.
I’ll save you, sweetheart. I pulled her to me and kissed her until I felt her go limp as a kitten. She kissed me back and her lips were the petals of a flower that never stops blooming.
“I don’t think he would leave me,” Evelyn was saying, and Ingrid shook herself back to reality. “I mean, I wouldn’t have thought he would leave me, but now I don’t know. I can’t leave him. I mean, what would I do? I can’t just—I have nothing.” She turned toward Ingrid. “What would I do?” As if Ingrid knew the answer.
“You could come to California with me,” Ingrid said.
Evelyn leaned back in the seat. “Oh, I’d love that. I’d love to see California.”
It’s not California who wants you, sweetheart, it’s me. L.A. will chew you up and spit you out faster than you can say ‘Sunset Boulevard.’
By the time they got back to Old Adams Road it was almost midnight. Ingrid got the Saab into the driveway and saw with relief that the house was dark. She did not want to see Ray, and she did not want Evelyn to see Ray either.
She shut off the motor and turned to Evelyn. “Thanks for letting me drive you around.”
“You’re a good driver,” Evelyn said. “You picked it up really quick.” She leaned over and gave Ingrid a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for being my pal.”
She kissed me. She kissed me, Mister. Her lips rode along my cheek like a Hollywood starlet driving through the worst part of town. People came down off their lousy porches to scream and cheer and try to touch her, she kissed me, kiss her back you fool
—Detective Slade gave Ingrid a shove but Ingrid was frozen in the Saab’s bucket seat—
and then her limo turned the corner and she was gone.

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