Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

The Fainting Room (11 page)

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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Ray, realizing from Ingrid’s tone that the mall had been absolutely the wrong suggestion, and that Evelyn was offended, tried a different tack: “Do you go into Boston much, Ingrid? Dorm excursions and so forth?”

That was better. Ingrid nodded and said, “Some. I’ve been to the symphony a couple times, and the museums and stuff. And sometimes we go hang out in Harvard Square. But I’m not, like—” she paused, on the verge of smiling—“a
shopper
. A lot of weekends I just ride my bike around on the back roads. I rode all the way over to Walden Pond the other day.”

“That must be ten miles. How’d you like it?”

“Well, it’s beautiful, of course. Even with the swimmer’s beach and stuff, it’s not really spoiled. I wouldn’t mind spending a year there in a tiny cabin.”

“ ‘I went to the woods,’” Ray quoted, “ ‘to see if I could discover what they had to teach me, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.’”

Evelyn looked at her husband. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s Thoreau,” Ingrid said. “You know,
Walden
? We had to read it last year. He was cool, but really,
I
just went to the woods to ride my bike.”

Ray laughed. “An equally fine pursuit.” Perhaps his wife had been right, he thought, perhaps it would be fun to have this girl around for the summer. She had a sense of humor, and she was smart. Maybe he and Evelyn could take her around a little, show her Boston. Evelyn had loved to be shown around when they were first dating; they’d gone to museums, jazz clubs, string quartets, plays. Now she never wanted to; Evelyn seemed to feel he was trying to correct lapses in her education and grew silent and bored in the galleries or fidgeted on the hard concert hall chairs. All he wanted was to share his enjoyment of things with someone he loved so that she might enjoy them too. He swirled the Riesling in his glass, finished it, poured more.

Evelyn pushed back her chair and began picking up plates.

“I’ll do that,” said Ingrid, glad of an excuse to leave the table. She picked up platter of ham and followed Evelyn into the kitchen. “Should I wrap this up? There’s a lot left.”

“No need. I’ll do it.”

“I don’t mind helping,” said Ingrid. “I mean, you’re letting me stay here and everything, the least I can do is help out.”

Evelyn fought back exasperation and opened the dishwasher. This was
her
kitchen,
her
space. When she first moved in, she had made Ray fire his cleaning lady—Mrs. Shaughnessy had exerted such a claim on the house that there was no room for Evelyn. She looked at Ingrid, who had taken a dishtowel and was wiping the counter with it. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s trash night. If you want to do something, why don’t you help Ray take out the trash? He’ll show you where.”

Ingrid looked up from the counter. Was it her imagination, or was Mrs. Shepard annoyed with her about something? She wasn’t frowning, not exactly, but there was something about her face that didn’t look like she was enjoying herself much. She also had red eyebrows, Ingrid noted, though they were not as red as her hair. And the color of her hair, well, red didn’t begin to cover it. It wasn’t red or orange or copper or rust either; it was all of these; it was a color to see from way off in the distance, a color to up-close stare at twice. And she was staring, she realized—she was just standing there staring at Mrs. Shepard like a total dork. Ingrid put down the dishrag and went quickly back into the dining room.

Ray was still sitting at the table, his chin in his hand.

“Mr. Shepard?”

“Yes?” He looked up at distractedly, as if he’d momentarily forgotten who she was. And then, focusing: “Yes, Ingrid?”

“Mrs. Shepard said I could help you take out the trash.”

“Did she.” He lifted his wineglass and drank off the rest of his wine. “And you’re eager for this assignment?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Very well, then.” Ray stood up. “Follow me to the dark recesses of the rubbish bins.”

They went outside and around the garage.

“I was wondering about the typing,” Ingrid said. “If you still wanted to maybe hire me to type your book for you.”

Ray, opening the door to the shed, was suddenly acutely aware of his life: thirty-nine years old and standing in front of a house with a large mortgage, unhappy at work, something going on with his wife that he couldn’t fathom, and this child of less than half his age stood there with her hands on her hips and asked him about the book he was supposed to be writing. At that moment the distance from the garbage cans to the typewriter on the second floor seemed almost insurmountable.

“Saturday,” he said to Ingrid in what he hoped was a hearty, optimistic tone. “I’ll spend the morning making sense of my notes and so forth and then—after lunch, say?—we can begin.”

“Cool,” she said, and grinned at him in the dusk, swinging the metal lid back onto the trash can with a clang. For her, he supposed, it was simply a matter of money.

Ray spent Saturday morning avoiding the notes for his manuscript, although he kept an eye on them while he coaxed the remaining pieces of glass from the muntins of the broken picture window. Alex Yeager was probably right, it was going to be impossible to find someone to reglaze a window with a curved pane, never mind the problem of removing the window and transporting it; it was much too big to put in the trunk of his car, and the master glazier, if he existed, would no doubt reside on an organic farm in Upstate New York or a houseboat in Bar Harbor.

As he passed the fainting room on his way to empty the wastebasket of glass bits, he could hear the sound of someone typing on his old manual Underwood. The muffled snap of the keys made a comforting sound, like the first kernels of popcorn popping on a stove. Ray tapped on the door and heard in response the hasty unrolling of paper from the typewriter carriage. Then Ingrid called, “Come in!”

He opened the door and stopped, surprised. The desk was clean; Ingrid had cleared away all the boxes of books and tax returns, and in their place she had arranged the typewriter and an ancient black metal desk fan he had never seen before, the kind of fan whose whirring blades would slice off your finger if you stuck it through the grille. Beside the fan stood a highball glass filled with some dark liquid that he hoped was not bourbon.

Ingrid leaned back in the chair, put her feet up on the desk and said, “Well?”

Ray was not sure what he was supposed to make of this. “It looks very clean in here,” he said. “What are you drinking?”

Ingrid scowled. “Iced tea. But it’s supposed to be rye.”

“Oh, now I get it,” Ray said. “The desk fan, the old typewriter—it’s like, ‘The Writer’s Studio, Hollywood, circa 1940.’ Or, maybe, ‘The Private Eye at his desk.’”

Ingrid grinned, an honest, unselfconscious grin that hiked the left side of her mouth high on her face. “Something like that. Actually, this house kind of reminds me of one of those swanky old places the private eye has to crash into. You know, where the rich lady with the missing husband invites him in for a drink and then starts making passes.”

“And then double crosses him, no doubt. I’m familiar with the genre,” Ray said, and felt himself grin back—there was no way he could not, having finally seen her crack a smile again. “Is that what you’re typing?” he asked, nodding at the papers she’d placed face down on the desk.

“Me? Oh—not really. I was just fooling around.” She crossed her arms, challenging him to pry further. When he didn’t, she took her feet off the desk and asked: “Are you ready to dictate?”

“You want to work in here?” As he said it, he remembered that when he was showing her around the house he had told her that this was his writing office. Well, why not? Better than having to look at the garbage bags he had taped over the broken window.

“I’ll go get my notes,” he said.

It was a slightly surreal version of his professional life, standing in this tiny room that was something like an office, with a person something like a secretary sitting at a desk, waiting for him to clear his throat and begin dictation. Though instead of Joanne in her prim hats and collars, it was a teenager in a torn green T-shirt, hair sticking up in all directions. Instead of the smell of Joanne’s breath mints, from Ingrid wafted the scent of something sharp and vaguely problematic: tobacco, he realized.

“Ready now?” she asked.

Ray cleared his throat but instead of beginning to read, asked, “Where did you put all the stuff that was on the desk?”

“In the closet there, behind the suits and coats and stuff. Do you mind?”

“No, that’s fine. Where’d the fan come from?”

“It’s mine. It’s from the ’forties. Look, it says Westinghouse on it. You know, the defense contractor. Cool, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

She was waiting, jiggling her feet on the chair’s broken strut.

“All right, Ingrid. If you’re not sure of the spelling of anything, don’t guess, just ask me.” He cleared his throat again. “Okay, ready?”

She raised her eyebrows and indicated with her chin her hands poised above the typewriter. Yes, she was ready already. He took a deep breath and waded in.

“Chapter Two. New paragraph. With the arrival of the dressed-down shingle style, comma, we see the equivalent adaptation into the middle class of an outline previously belonging only to the very rich, period. Similar in silhouette but stripped of ornamentation, comma, shingle style provided an entryway into a vernacular adaptation of the aesthetic choices begun with the Queen Anne style. Period.”

She typed with childish concentration—tongue protruding slightly from the corner of her mouth—and an adult’s accuracy, her fingers fast over the keys. She asked no questions and paused only when he did, her hands arrested in mid-flight. During one particularly long pause while he tried to reword an awkward phrase about the Victorians’ penchant for window moldings, Ingrid retrieved a pencil from the floor and held it between her fingers like a cigarette. When she put it to her lips as if to inhale, he lost his train of thought.

“Would you like a break?”

“I’m okay.” She spoke around the pencil.

“You’re an excellent typist—I think I’ll have to pay you more than minimum wage. Where’d you learn?”

“I took typing as an elective after school last year. And I practice a lot. It relaxes me. What’s funny?”

“Nothing—I guess I never thought of typing as being relaxing. Where were we?”

“‘...
Whose trinity fenestrations offer us a model for the subsequent derivations that became popular in the latter half of the period
.’” She looked up at him. “Hey, Mr. Shepard?”

“Call me Ray, please.”

“Okay. Um, I was just wondering. Who’s going to read this?”

“Other architects. Architecture students. Why?”

“It’s kind of …I dunno, it’s kind of hard to get into.”

“It’s academic scholarship, not a detective novel.”

“Sorry, no offense,” Ingrid said hastily. “But hey, speaking of detective novels, when I was clearing off the desk, I saw a whole bunch of them in a box. How come they’re boxed up?”

“Those? I just never got around to giving them to Goodwill, I guess.”

In fact, some months before he had entertained the idea that if he were ever to leave Dunlap and Scott, he might make the study into an office where he could receive clients, and if that were so, he couldn’t very well have
The Thin Man, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly
and their various pulpy counterparts on the shelves alongside his professional books. He didn’t want them in the living room downstairs either, where the shelves held hardcovers of Conrad, Eliot, and Shakespeare’s
Complete Works
. So he’d stuck the crime novels in here.

“Don’t get rid of them,” said Ingrid. “I’ll put them in my room.”

“You like detective novels?”

“Not Agatha Christie. I like the hard-boiled stuff, what you have.”

Ray smiled. “When I was in college, I used to write detective stories myself. I even had one of them published.”

“Wow. Maybe I’ve even read it.”

“I doubt it,” said Ray. “This was well before you were born.”

“Wow,” said Ingrid again, “a long time ago, huh.”

“Back when the earth’s crust was cooling.”

She smiled again, ducking her head toward the desk to hide it.

“So can I see it?”

It had been years and years since he had shown this story to anyone. “I’d have to see if I could find the magazine,” he said, knowing exactly where it was.

“Well, see if you can.”

Ray looked back at the sheaf of scrawled pages in his hands, but any interest he had in
Victorian Architecture: A Treatise
had temporarily vanished. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s wrap it up for today.”

“I’m not tired or anything,” Ingrid said.

“
I
am tired or anything. Besides, I haven’t had lunch.”

BOOK: The Fainting Room

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