Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

The Fainting Room (9 page)

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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That must be a joke, Ray thought, though he’d never known Dunlap to make one. He might ask Ray to have dinner with a client, perhaps, but a not a basketball game. Surely it was a joke? He went out to talk to Joanne, the receptionist.

“Oh dear,” Joanne said. “I think this is my fault.”

“Yours?”

Joanne had been at the firm for fifteen years, even longer than Ray had. She was somewhere around forty, was unintimidated by office politics, and besides being an excellent secretary, she knew quite a bit about architecture—more, Ray thought, than some of the newer architects. She had conveyed, without coming out and saying it, that she shared Ray’s dim view of the direction Dunlap and Scott was headed.

Now she took off her big-framed glasses, a habit she had when she wanted to say something she considered important.

“My fault. Yes. The other day I was taking dictation for Dunlap about the Keeley arena. And then out of the blue, he asked me who around here was a good listener. Besides me. And—well, I said you were.” Joanne looked away, embarrassed.

“That’s kind of you,” Ray said, “but how do we get from there to my having to sit through a basketball game with Fergus Keeley?”

“Keeley likes to talk,” Joanne said. “A lot. I didn’t know why Dunlap was asking, but then when I said you were a good listener, he said, ‘in that case, I’ll have Shepard take him on.’ I’m sorry, Ray—I know the Keeley arena’s not your kind of project. I even tried to tell Dunlap to give it to someone else.”

“Dunlap should make
you
partner,” Ray said. “And it’s not your fault. But does it have to be a Celtics game? I don’t follow basketball at all.”

“Well, the point is to go see something at Boston Garden. I think Keeley wants his arena to look just like it.”

“Dear Lord, this is not why I became an architect. Tickets to anything but basketball, all right, Joanne? You owe me that. Just get me out of having to listen to Keeley talk sports for three hours.”

Thursday Joanne handed him a Bostix envelope.

“The circus?” Ray was baffled.

“To you men, Keeley talks about his basketball court injury. To me, he shows pictures of young Gus Keeley the third, and the other one—little Larry, I think it is, named after Bird. So I told him you wanted to meet his grandchildren. What’s wrong?”

“The circus? Screaming children, sticky cement floors, agoraphobia-inducing crowds, aggressive vendors—”

“You said, ‘Get tickets for anything but basketball.’ Besides, you have
two
tickets. So you can bring a guest.”

“That’s true,” Ray said absently, not seeing Joanne’s hopeful smile.

He was thinking there was no one in his circle of friends and acquaintances he could possibly talk into accompanying him to the circus, much less with Keeley and his grandchildren in tow. He wasn’t dating anyone, though he had been set up several times that year by friends’ wives. The wives always sought him out at parties and talked to him—unlike most of their husbands, Ray did khow to listen, ask questions. Then, inevitably, the wives would say, “I know the perfect girl for you. Just take her out, you’ll love her.”

But love was never what emerged. Ray always left these dates feeling acutely aware of a kind of mental checklist on which both he and the woman seemed to be ticking off items while they discussed Gorbachev or Gloria Steinem, and when the date—or, occasionally, the brief relationship—was over, he would feel relieved at being alone again, spending his free evenings with a book or the radio’s evening concert, throwing himself into one project or another, oblivious of the rut into which his life was settling, deeper and deeper with each passing year. And somewhere along the way, he became aware of emotions he could not believe he was feeling: boredom, loneliness, and the inexplicable sense that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. That absurd though it sounded, he might be wasting his life.

He felt certain he was wasting his afternoon when, on a rainy Saturday in early November, he arrived at Boston Garden to meet Fergus Keeley. He navigated the current of jostling bodies up through the Garden’s vast and chilly stairwells, and the damp crowds surging around him made him feel both claustrophobic and lonely. His seat was good—midway up in the orchestra section in front of the center ring, and a bank of several seats on either side of him were empty, waiting, he supposed, to be filled by Keeley and his grandsons. Despite the empty seats around him, still Ray felt hemmed in by noise and bodies. The cement under his feet was slick with tracked rain and spilled soda, the damp in the air infused with the smell of elephant dung. But where was Keeley?

The lights went down and the ringmaster began rolling his voice out over the audience. The show began. Still Keeley did not appear. Clowns came and went, then bareback riders. Vendors went up and down the aisles hawking programs, popcorn, and noisemakers. The wedding of two midgets was announced.

A woman appeared in his aisle. “Excuse me,” she said, and Ray looked up, confused: was this Keeley’s wife? No, ‘excuse me’ meant, Move your knees, I want to get by. So he stood to let her pass, a young woman mostly hidden inside a hooded blue raincoat, holding in front of her like a torch a large burst of pink cotton candy.

“I was way up there where God lost his shoes,” she said above the noise of the orchestra. “No sense wrecking my eyes when there’s empty seats down here. No one’s sitting here, are they?” She plunked down in the seat next to his but one and took a bite of cotton candy.

“Ah, no, I mean, actually, I was supposed to meet some people in this row.”

“Then someone is sitting here, you mean?” She started to get up, and he waved his hand to stop her.

“You’re welcome to sit there,” he said. “I don’t think they’re coming.”

“Thanks,” she said, and shrugged out of her hooded raincoat, which Ray now saw had concealed brilliant red hair and an intent expression. She watched the clowns, he thought, as if she were studying for an exam. Her red eyebrows angled together in an odd little frown of concentration, broken now and again when she smiled. She seemed to be enjoying both the performance and her cotton candy, licking the clots of pink sugar off the tips of her fingers with gusto. Something about it made him feel sad: he was an imposter here. The next time a vendor climbed by, he signaled him over and asked for a bag of popcorn.

“No popcorn,” said the vendor. “Pinwheels, hooters, snake whistles. No food.”

Ray felt foolish.

“Here,” said the woman beside him, “piece of mine?”

Peace of mind
, Ray heard her say, then interpreted correctly and watched in surprise as his hand reached out for the paper cone. Then he was holding the sticky thing and utterly ignorant of the rules for cotton candy eating. He stuck out a finger and touched the substance: it felt like cheap upholstery stuffing. He pinched a bit away and felt it dissolve slightly in the heat of his fingers. In his mouth it was oddly pleasant. There was a second of flavorlessness, sensation of eating a dust ball, and then the stuff melted in absurd sweetness over his tongue.

The spotlight swung up to the rafters and tightrope walkers were announced. Ray watched a shirtless man in glittering tights cross the wire blindfolded, pausing in the center to perform a backbend. When he righted himself by kicking his legs over his head the audience cheered. Ray thought he should probably cheer too, but felt too self-conscious. So he clapped, realizing as he did so that the woman beside him was silent, neither cheering nor clapping. He glanced at her. Her eyes were fixed on the performers. The cotton candy was gone, her hands were empty now, and she was crying.

He turned away, pretending not to notice, and the next time he allowed himself to glance at her, at intermission, her eyes were dry. She caught him looking and smiled. She wore too much makeup, he thought, but in spite of that, she was pretty, with bright eyes that looked more intelligent than her blue eye shadow suggested. And he liked the way she smiled at him: friendly without being a come-on, a kind of friendliness less guarded than what he was used to in New England; he knew without being told that she was from somewhere else. When the food vendor came by he bought two cups of soda pop and offered her one.

“So why’re you all alone in this row?” she asked. “Somebody stand you up?”

He explained about the sports arena and basketball and Fergus Keeley. And then, in a burst of not caring whether he was being a polite conversationalist he asked if she too had been waiting for someone.

She shook her head. “I came alone. I just saw a poster, on the way home from work.”

“What do you do?”

She hesitated. “I work in a beauty salon.”

He asked her which one, as if he were in the habit of frequenting beauty salons.

“Hollywood,” she said, in a tone that suggested the name annoyed her. Then the overhead lights dimmed. The show was beginning again and Ray was sorry; it was nice to talk to a woman he wasn’t trying to impress. Then he realized he did want to impress her. And he wanted her to keep talking—she had a voice with a hint of music in it, not a southern accent, quite, but her words were slower, rounder than he was used to hearing.

“What’s your name?” he asked, leaning in toward her and whispering since it was, after all, a performance they were watching. She smelled of cheap fruity shampoo and the vinyl of her raincoat and another, fainter scent he could identify only as female.

“Evelyn,” she answered, but she was not interested in talking any more; she was watching the tigers take their places in the ring below.

When it was over he walked beside her through the masses shuffling along the ugly cement ramps out into the rain.

“Can I drop you somewhere?” he asked.

She hesitated. “I was going to walk, actually. But you could walk me part of the way, I guess. I mean, if you want to.”

They set off down Causeway Street in the early evening light, a sky orange after the rain. She remembered he’d said he was an architect, asked in her lilting voice if he’d designed anything around here. Ray cast his eyes reflexively up and down the street. Beautiful buildings, some of them, above crummy storefronts. “Not on this street. But there’s something I worked on over near South Station.”

“I’ve been to South Station,” she said, the way someone else might say, I’ve been to Paris. As if it were a destination in itself. Her mascara had run, he noticed, and remembered the tears she’d shed during the performance. Why did that make his heart pound? Why did he want to take his handkerchief and wipe away the streaks of brown at the inner corners of her eyes?

Then she said, “It must be fun, designing buildings and things. When I was a kid, I used to cut out pictures in magazines of houses I wanted to live in and keep them in a scrapbook.”

“That’s very sweet.”
Can I buy you a drink
, he wanted to say, he did not say it.

She kept peeking at him from beneath the hood of her raincoat, wondering, he supposed, if this man were trying to pick her up. Ray wondered it too. He had never picked up a woman in his life, but everything about this afternoon was different from what he usually did. Then she pushed her hood back from her face and he saw all over again how very brilliant red her hair was. She caught him looking, and blushed, an actual blush, her fair skin coloring pink beneath its dusting of powder. She looked away, then looked back at him and smiled. Her two front teeth were very slightly pushed in, and he found this—there was no denying it now—unaccountably sexy.

Then she pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear and he caught sight of the wedding band on her finger. Why hadn’t he noticed she was married? He didn’t want to pursue another man’s wife. He felt a twinge of unease at the idea that he had even started to do so, then told himself he was being childish; he hadn’t done anything, he was only walking her—where, actually? They were practically in Chinatown now. He mentioned this.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t mean to take you so far out of your way. I can go on alone from here. I live just a few blocks further on.”

She had misunderstood him. “I’m happy to walk you to your door,” he said. “I just wondered where—”

She was uncomfortable. Perhaps she was afraid to tell him where she lived in case he turned out to be a stalker. But she didn’t look frightened; if anything, she seemed embarrassed. “I’m practically there,” she said. “It’s on Washington Street, just at Lagrange.”

“Then I certainly should walk you the rest of the way. That’s a terrible neighborhood.”

“It’s the neighborhood I live in.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” Ray said hurriedly. “I just meant I’ve probably made you late, ambling along talking, and now it’s dark: I’d hate for anything to happen to you.”

“I walk home from work every night,” Evelyn said, “so one night of protection probably won’t make much difference.” She traced a crack on the sidewalk with her shoe. “Well, it was nice meeting you. Now I guess have one friend here.”

“Not counting your husband, that is.” He blurted it.

“My husband?”

“I see you’re married.”

She followed his gaze to her left hand and raised it, looked at the ring as if she were surprised to see it there, and then back at him.

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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