The Fainting Room (38 page)
Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
Ray crunched an ice cube. He felt very far away. “You won’t have to wonder any longer,” he said. “Joanne and I are not working together any more.”
“Did Dunlap move her?”
Ray shook his head. Evelyn had no idea how an office worked, none at all.
“Did he fire her?”
“No. Jesus Christ.” He put down the glass and looked at his wife unsteadily. “I resigned.”
She stared at him, then looked around the kitchen, up at the pressed tin ceiling as if perhaps someone else had spoken the words. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I quit.” Ray took another swallow of his drink. Suddenly he felt exhausted.
“You quit?” she repeated.
He nodded. “No more Joanne. You don’t have to worry. Not that you would have had to. Worry, I mean. Anyway, now—”
“You quit your job?” She was shaking her head. “Ray, what. What were you thinking?” She was yelling. “I can’t believe you!” She was yelling at him.
“What else could I have done?” He put his head down on the table for a moment. His headache was coming back. “Where did you think Dunlap was going to move her to?” he asked. “It’s a ten person office. Or was. Now it’s nine. Did you really think he would fire her? Because I asked him to? She’s forty years old and has no family. Be reasonable.”
“You’re telling me you cheated on me for someone ten years older than I am? Was she that good between the sheets?”
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.
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.”
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.”
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 car. 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.”
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