The Fainting Room (18 page)

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Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong

BOOK: The Fainting Room
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“When are we leaving?” she asked.
Standing behind his wife, Ray knew he gave the appearance of being in agreement with the invitation. It was too late for anything but to say, “We have to leave now, or we’ll be late.”
Ingrid slid off the bed and set the iguana down in the terrarium. “Cool,” she said. “I just have to put my shoes on.”
His eyes strayed to the rocking chair, where Ingrid had arranged a large baby doll wearing a gas mask.
“I’ll meet you out front,” he said, and went down to the kitchen to find something they could eat in the car.
They ate crackers and salted peanuts while he drove. They had to run from the parking garage to Symphony Hall, arriving just as the lights went down. “Evelyn’s not feeling well,” he told the Yeagers, grateful there wasn’t time for anything more to be said about her absence. “This is Ingrid, the Newell student who’s with us for the summer.”
They sat, stood again and applauded when Horowitz came out. Ray was unnerved by how old he looked. Although he had bought the tickets in part because he imagined this might be the last chance he’d get to hear the master in person, he was not prepared for the frailness of the man in a tuxedo that looked too large for him, nor for the near-translucence he seemed to have acquired, as if his skin had grown so thin with age that the light shone partly through it.
Horowitz bowed his upper body stiffly to acknowledge the applause. A standing ovation before he had even played a note—now that was fame, Ray thought. That was a life that had achieved something. The pianist sat down and moved his hands into position over the keyboard—hands that, though Ray could not see them closely enough to discern arthritic knots—must surely give him trouble now; the man must be eighty. Then he brought his hands down on the keys and Horowitz the man became Horowitz the musician. Ray closed his eyes. He wanted the music to take him away from himself and the problems of the evening, and away from the tiny mean worm of jealousy he felt in the presence of a man who had so fully realized his gifts. He leaned forward, toward the source of the sound, away from his thoughts.
The music that had been hanging silently in the air since Beethoven had first captured it and fastened it to the page found voice again in Horowitz’s hands, took flight. Yes, there, and there. It was birds, it was heartbreak and stonework, it was light and clouds over buildings in old cities that still stood. It was part of them, and they were greater than themselves; that was Horowitz’s gift to them all.
When the lights went up for intermission, Ingrid turned to Ray. “He’s pretty excellent, isn’t he?”
“He is indeed.”
Alex and Marseille were standing up on his other side, wanting to get out of the row. The four of them squeezed out into the crowded lobby, where Marseille touched Ray on the arm. “We were so looking forward to Evelyn coming tonight,” Marseille said. “What happened?”
“She had a really bad allergy attack,” Ingrid put in, before Ray could respond. “Her eyes and nose were all red and swollen.”
Marseille’s brow furrowed and she turned back to Ray. “She’s all right?” A query with subtext.
“She just needs to rest,” Ray said firmly. “I’m sure she’ll be fine tomorrow.”
“Then I’m going to call her up tomorrow and invite her to lunch,” Marseille said. And to Ingrid: “How do you like the concert?”
“A lot,” Ingrid said. “I like him, this Vladimir Horowitz guy. He doesn’t look like he’d be a match for that huge piano, does he? But he is. I think I like solo performances better than symphonies. You know, when there’s just one piano on its own I can follow it better. Maybe if I knew more about themes and motifs in the music, I’d get more into symphonic stuff.”
Marseille said, in a tone Ingrid found instantly annoying, “How wonderful that you have an appreciation for classical music at your age. Perhaps you’ll come with us again sometime.”
“Perhaps,” Ingrid repeated, and Ray heard the faint mockery in her voice. “I like a lot of other music too—I have a pretty big hardcore collection. You know, the Sex Pistols, Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies.”
Marseille smiled, unwilling to be baited. “Our son has some of those records. I suppose there must be something redeeming about them that our older ears are too deaf to appreciate.” She turned to the two men. “Don’t you remember when our parents were so horrified because we were listening to that indecent Elvis Presley?” The three adults laughed, and then Marseille excused herself to go to the ladies’ room.
“Think I’ll go too,” said Ingrid, but when she’d gotten a few feet away from the men, she turned and went in the opposite direction from Marseille.
“Where’s she going?” Alex asked.
“Probably outside to smoke,” Ray said. They watched Ingrid’s dark head appear and disappear among the taller heads around her and then come to a stop in front of the lobby bar.
Ray glanced at Alex. “She never has matches,” he said, not wanting to acknowledge that she was probably trying to buy a drink, as that would mean going over there and stopping her. Not that he cared, really—all boarding school kids drank, he remembered that very well from his own years at Andover, and one glass of wine wouldn’t matter very much—but he didn’t want Marseille and Alex to think he was being negligent. Sure enough, now Ingrid had a plastic cup in her hand.
He turned back to Alex, was disconcerted to see Alex had been watching him watch Ingrid.
Alex grinned. “Isn’t she a bit young for you?”
Ray stared at him.
Alex punched him lightly on the shoulder and laughed.
“A joke, Ray.”
“Jesus, Alex. That’s not funny.”
“All right, sorry.”
“I told you, Ingrid’s with us for the summer. It was Evelyn’s idea to have her come tonight—Ingrid likes classical music, and this is probably her only chance to hear Horowitz before he dies. It seemed a shame to waste the ticket.”
“All right, all right, don’t be so sensitive. Marseille says my sense of humor is arrested in the early adolescent stage.
Apologia
. Ah, Marsielle, there you are. Ready to go in?”
Marseille pursed freshly Chapsticked lips. “Where’s Ingrid?”
“There,” said Alex, grinning again. The three of them watched as Ingrid, not seeing them, slurped the remainder of the glass of wine she had managed to purchase, deposited the plastic cup on a windowsill, and then turned and came up to them, smelling freshly of nicotine.
Now Ray was annoyed with everything—with Alex’s adolescent sense of humor, with Evelyn’s infantile pouting, with Ingrid’s drinking and smoking and her nicotine-wafting thrift store clothes and even her two-toned leather shoes, which looked as if they’d been stolen from a bowling alley.
“Shall we go in, then?” said Marseille brightly. She took Alex’s arm and they joined the crowd going back into the hall. Ray looked at Ingrid as she walked ahead of him into the hall. Sure enough, on the back of each shoe, “7 ½ L” had been lettered on with white paint.
Why had Alex’s joke bothered him so much? He had always disliked men who made themselves ridiculous in the presence of much younger women—or teenage girls, for that matter. He glanced at Ingrid, slouched beside him in the uncomfortable orchestra seats. Her eyes were closed. He noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that her face was round in the way only the faces of young girls are, that her elbows were dirty. He moved his eyes back to her breasts to test his own reaction and imagined for a moment how her breasts must look beneath her tee shirt. They would be smallish, smaller than Evelyn’s, and high and firm of course—she was a teenager still. Ray felt a surge of heat move from his belly to his groin and looked away. A silly exercise, he thought; his stiffening cock was a visceral reaction encoded into his genes by years of evolution, but it had nothing to do with him, with what he actually desired. Besides, Ingrid was not a girl who used her sexuality; neither her clothes nor her manner gave any indication that she might be a sexual person. He liked this about her—it made it easier to be friends, and, he realized, he respected her for it. When he thought of the girls he’d known when he was Ingrid’s age he remembered how some of them had seemed drenched in their own sexuality, shedding possibility like petals in a sudden wind, almost glowing with the power that being desirable had conferred on them. There had been a Beatles concert, it must have been 1965, and Ray’s date—a girl named Maureen in cat’s-eye glasses and a blue dress—screamed and sobbed beside him with such naked intensity that he was genuinely frightened. He’d left the stadium and gone into the men’s room. The bathroom, like the lobby, was completely empty; no one could bear to leave the show for even a few moments. He’d locked himself in a stall, masturbated to calm his nerves, then sat there a good five minutes before venturing back into the throng of screams. He had never dated Maureen again; the image of her face, contorted, transported into a terrifying abandon of desire, was etched into his mind with the indelible specificity of a nightmare.
It was during the last Chopin piece that Ingrid, eyes closed, not knowing she was doing it, slouched gently against Ray. He looked down in alarm. There was a very faint smile on her face like nothing he had ever seen there before, so restful was it. She was a statue of warm marble, unmoving. She had become part of the music. Ray glanced at Alex on his other side, who was nodding toward the stage, and Marseille was nodding along with him, her eyes on Horowitz as well. Ray felt an ache that had less to do with the beauty of the music than the problem that his wife was not here to share it. That she’d refused to go see Vladimir Horowitz, had packed him off instead to experience it with a sixteen-year-old nihilist who at this moment was smiling a smile as unguarded as a child’s as she forgot herself and leaned into him. The feel of Ingrid’s shoulder against his arm had had a kind of domino effect: as she leaned against him, he felt himself leaning toward his wish for Evelyn to be enjoying this with him. The longing the music stirred in him would be satisfied, he felt, by having two things he loved together in the same room, Evelyn and this music, and Evelyn appreciating the music, hearing it as he heard it. Did she not know what pleasure there was in such things, how lovely it was to take the hand of the person you loved while listening to something that said more than could ever be put into words in this lifetime?
In the car on the way home, Ingrid was so quiet that Ray wondered if she had fallen asleep. But when he pulled into the driveway, Ingrid touched him on the shoulder. He jumped, looked at her to see if it was on purpose this time. She was looking at him, it was.
“Yes?”
“Well, just—thanks for taking me,” she said. “I went to Symphony Hall once last year with my dorm to hear
The Messiah
, but this was totally different. I’m glad I got to hear him play. I don’t know how to describe it other than ‘amazing,’ but that’s not really it, is it. Anyway, thank you.”
“You’re most welcome,” said Ray. “Yes, Horowitz is truly amazing. Tonight was the chance of a lifetime.” But as he said it he realized his mind had been so busy he hadn’t really heard the second half of the program at all.
11.
 
Ingrid rubbed soap into her hair, which made it stick up better than hair gel, smoked a cigarette out the bathroom window, and then went and got Melvin. She draped the iguana over the back of her neck the way Jesus is shown carrying a lamb in illustrated children’s Bibles; thus adorned, she went downstairs to the sun porch and peered in. Yes, Evelyn was there, sitting on the chaise longue and rummaging in a basket filled with bottles of nail polish.
Ingrid hesitated. Ever since Detective Slade’s first attempt at gathering information had been humiliatingly derailed by Evelyn stroking her arm and sending an invasion of radioactive spiders crawling through her, she’d been pondering her tactics. This time she’d brought Melvin along as the front man. With Melvin as distraction, perhaps she’d manage to ask about the long scar on the back of Evelyn’s hand, and maybe find out more about the dead husband too.
Ingrid cleared her throat and Evelyn looked up.
Think Sam Spade, think Philip Marlowe. Mister, I don’t have to look tough. I just am.
“Um,” Ingrid said, wanted to kick herself.
“Yes?”
“Well, I was thinking about what you said the other day. That you used to do manicures.”
Evelyn nodded, selected a bottle of coral-colored polish and waited.
“So I was wondering—Melvin needs his toenails cut, and I don’t have the money to take him to the vet. Last time I did it myself they bled, and I thought, I thought maybe you could cut them.”
Evelyn put down the bottle of polish. “You want me to cut your lizard’s toenails?”
“I thought since you weren’t afraid to pick him up, maybe you wouldn’t mind.”
“Do I look like a person who can cut a bearded dragon’s toenails?”
“I just thought—since you didn’t mind picking him up that day—” Ingrid trailed off.
Mister, she was laughing
. Laughing,
damn it. Sometimes my ideas are all wet.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“Oh dear—” Evelyn shook her head and leaned back on the chaise. “What’s funny? Look at me: here I am with my bottles of nail polish and my emery boards, just sitting here on this nice little sofa thing next to a jar of potpourri. And yet for some reason you ask me can I cut your lizard’s toenails. Well as it happens, I can cut a lizard’s toenails. That’s what’s funny.” She picked up the hand towel she’d spread over the arm of the chaise. “Here. Wrap him up in this so he can’t jerk around, and hold him at the back of his neck.”

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