Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
The Fainting Room (33 page)
The door was open, and Dunlap was at his usual position, looking at the river with his back to Ray.
“I’m here,” Ray said loudly.
Dunlap turned. “Close the door please, Ray, would you? Sit down.”
Ray sat, put his arms on the chair arms, looked at his hands which five hours earlier had been caressing an adolescent girl.
Dunlap unrolled a set of drawings, and put his elbows on the sheets of paper to hold them open. He folded his long white fingers together. A church, a steeple.
“These drawings are totally unacceptable,” he said. “They were sent out to bid and came back over budget in every single category.”
Ray took off his glasses, put them back on again, squinted at the drawings, which said in the lower right corner that he had drawn them last month and that they were for a financial building at South Station. What had Dunlap just said to him? Over budget.
“I don’t think the client has a realistic view of what it’s going to cost to get what he wants,” Ray said. That was good, that was the right thing to say. They’d had the over-budget argument before, and some of the time Ray won it. “And since they have the money,” Ray went on, it’s better I draw them what they want and then they spend a little more to get it built, don’t you think? Because if we start out by cutting corners, we’re going to end up with a project no one’s happy with.” He sat back, relieved that he was able to function after all, and feeling pleased with his answer.
“It’s unacceptable,” Dunlap repeated. The steeple of his fingers disappeared, the church collapsed. “Ray, we’ve been over this time and again. Too many times.”
Ray sighed. He didn’t have the energy to argue this, he realized. Not with everything else going on. “Fine,” he said. I’ll redraw them this weekend.”
“You won’t.” Dunlap shook his head, silver hair trembling. “I don’t see that I have any choice but to take you off this project. I’m having William Garrison work up a new set of drawings and we’ll go from there. Give him all your notes and sketches before you leave today.”
“William Garrison?”
Dunlap shifted his eyes to the door behind Ray’s chair, as if he could see through it and down the hall to where the pimply William Garrison sat. “He has the cubicle next to Alex Yeager’s.”
“I know who he is,” Ray said. “How old is he, about twenty-three? He hasn’t got anywhere near the experience for this size job, and he can’t draw his way out of a paper bag.”
“He does, however, have an understanding of what is involved in running this firm smoothly, as a team. Something you might reflect on before it’s too late.” Dunlap’s eyes darted back to Ray, peered at him with uncharacteristic directness. “That, by the way, is not merely a suggestion.”
And Dunlap picked up the phone and began dialing.
I am going to walk out of here and keep on going, Ray thought as he went down the hall and back to his desk. In addition to the situation with Ingrid, now there was a good chance he was going to be fired. He wanted a drink and a shower and he wanted to trade in his problems for someone else’s. He looked down and saw he was clenching and unclenching his fists. Maybe Alex could be persuaded to leave his desk and go across the street for a drink. But he couldn’t talk to Alex; there was that crack Alex had made the night he took Ingrid to the symphony—“Isn’t she a little young for you?” Why had Alex said that, when back then, that night, Ray had been completely innocent? Perhaps he could talk to Marseille. She was a psychiatrist after all, she was used to seeing the darker side of people. And besides, years ago Ray had found out, quite by accident, that Marseille had been cheating on Alex with a Psy. D. Lecturer at Harvard. She’d broken it off shortly after Ray had accidentally seen them together, and as far as Ray knew, Alex had never known about it.
But what would he say? “Marseille, I’m in love with a sixteen year-old, but it’s not because Ingrid’s a teenager, it’s because she’s Ingrid. And I’m not going to act on it—except that I’ve already kissed her.” No, he couldn’t tell Marseille. Besides, she was a mandated informer, or whatever they called it, she’d have to call the police and they’d put him in jail. Or could they? He hadn’t had sex with her or anything—was kissing a minor still statutory rape? Oh God, that I am even thinking all this, Ray thought. At the very least, Marseille would take Ingrid away, citing child endangerment, and put her on a plane back to her father’s and he’d never see her again.
Poor Ingrid: she didn’t deserve any of this. The best thing to do was to put Ingrid on a plane back to California. Let her go, then she’d be gone and no one would be the wiser. Except that would mean ripping a hole in his life through which he was afraid all his happiness would leak out. But hadn’t it leaked out already? How long before Evelyn found out? But wasn’t it Evelyn who was always pushing Ingrid at him? It was Evelyn who’d wanted Ingrid to go to the symphony that night, Evelyn who told Ingrid to walk up to the ridge with him. Evelyn who said to kiss her goodnight. Well, that meant his wife trusted him, that was all. Believed he was not the type to go chasing after sixteen-year-olds. Which was true enough, he wasn’t the type. Yet he was doing it.
He sat at his desk with his thoughts going in circles until four-thirty, which was still too early to leave, but he didn’t care by then. On his way out through the reception area, Joanne looked up from her desk.
“Dunlap get you?” she asked.
“You could call it that.” Ray paused, glad to be momentarily anchored in the world outside his head. “What do you know about it?”
Joanne tapped the side of her temple. “Just that whenever he wants to bawl someone out, it’s a conference in his office. If he wanted to praise you, he’d take you to lunch.”
“I guess it’s been a while since I was taken to lunch,” Ray said. “I got the bawling out.” He sat down on the edge of Joanne’s desk and took a peppermint from the candy dish she kept there. It was good to be having a normal conversation for a moment; it kept him from thinking about what he’d done with Ingrid.
“Dunlap’s in a bad mood today,” Joanne said. “He told me not to make his coffee with cream any more, that he’s watching his cholesterol. So I made it with milk and then he complains it doesn’t taste right.” Joanne wrinkled her nose in a rabbity smile to show Ray that she wasn’t really bothered. Though Joanne was usually quite tactful—she wouldn’t have lasted so long as a receptionist without a high degree of tact—Ray had noticed that she wasn’t above poking fun at her boss, either. He supposed that was necessary to her longevity at the firm as well.
No one was coming into or out of the front doors just then, so Ray stayed sitting on the edge of her desk eating peppermints, and they chatted for a quarter of an hour in carefully general terms about the changing aesthetics of the profession. Though Joanne was careful to be diplomatically vague in her comments, a softening of the lines between her eyebrows and the way she leaned toward him in her swivel chair made Ray feel that her personal opinion about the direction the firm was going agreed with his own, and not Dunlap’s.
Then it was five o’clock, and Joanne gathered up her purse and said that on her lunch break she’d bought a small ficus tree from the plant store across the street; would he mind picking it up and driving her and the plant home?
“Not at all,” said Ray, thinking that perhaps outside the office he could ask her if she thought Dunlap really was threatening to fire him. Joanne had considerably more intelligence than her job required, and had been at the firm for fifteen years. She knew her superiors’ personalities, had seen arguments and cliques and powerplays come and go; if he could get her honest opinion, whatever she told him would probably be correct.
But in the car, Joanne went on and on about her ficus, how she had always loved them for some reason he didn’t catch because he was rehearsing in his mind what he would ask her, and then they had covered the dozen blocks to Joanne’s building. So he offered to carry the tree upstairs to her apartment.
He deposited the ficus between two small windows with a view of nothing, and Joanne said stay for a glass of wine. He accepted. Joanne shooed her cat off the sofa and they sat down there together, facing the ficus, and Ray recounted his conversation with Dunlap. Joanne listened without interrupting and when he finished, she thought for a while without saying anything, leaning down to scratch the cat behind the ears.
“Well, he’s right,” she said at last. “You can’t keep designing things that come back over budget. That slows everyone down. But the real problem is that he wants you to design completely decontextualized buildings to please rich clients who saw something like it in Houston. And you don’t want to do it. So do I think he’s really threatening to fire you? No. I think he’s trying to punish you for being a better architect than he is. Dunlap knows you’re the best architect in the firm.”
Ray coughed to hide his embarrassment. But it’s true, he thought, I am. He swirled the last of the wine in his glass. He had sipped his way down without really noticing what he was drinking. Now he took the final mouthful and breathed through it, then swallowed and looked at Joanne in surprise.
“This is fantastically good. What is it?”
She smiled so broadly Ray that could see her bridge work. She’d been hoping he’d ask. She went into her tiny galley kitchen and returned with the bottle.
“I’ve never heard of it,” Ray admitted. “Where did you find it?”
“I’m taking a wine tasting class at the Center for Adult Ed. Here.” She refilled the glasses. “Notice how it changes from vanilla to blackberry as you go down?”
She went back to the kitchen for a dish of olives and some bread, then paused to drop the arm of the record player onto Mahler’s first symphony. They made their way through the wine, comparing notes on oak and tannin, then returned to the subject of Dunlap again, until, leaning back against the sofa, Ray realized he was drunk. They’d begun imagining what Dunlap would be like as Santa Claus—Old, portly Scott had played Santa at a children’s hospital at Christmas before he died—and Joanne was wrinkling her nose and laughing at Ray’s fantasy of Dunlap’s Santa—“‘You’re all getting coal, however much you might wish otherwise.’” Then, as Joanne leaned forward in a fit of giggles—was he really that funny?—she spilled the last of her wine on his pants.
“Oh God, Ray, I’m so sorry. Here, let me blot it.” She pulled a few Kleenex from her purse on the floor and began rubbing at the dark stain on his leg. The pressure of her hand loosened a pool of tipsy adrenalin through him. What was the world coming to when his receptionist was rubbing her hand over his thigh, inches from his crotch? He put his hand over hers—to take the Kleenex away; the stain needed a paper towel and soda water—but his hand stayed there, on top of hers, and then a moment later she was kissing him. And yes, this was what the world had come to: he was kissing her.
Not a sixteen-year-old. Another adult.
He had never thought of Joanne as an object of desire, not even in all the years before he met Evelyn. She had always been friendly toward him, but it was part of her job to be friendly. If someone had asked him yesterday whether he found Joanne attractive, he would have been surprised by the question, having never considered it one way or the other. Joanne was regarded throughout the firm as highly competent, and a mantle of asexuality that was somehow an inseparable accessory to that competence had always enshrouded her. If asked what she looked like, he would have said, Short, wears clogs.
And now they were having sex on her Jennifer Convertible sofa, the ficus still standing in the middle of the floor with its branches bound. Joanne’s mouth tasted of wine and the peppermints on her desk, and under her dowdy brown skirt there was an entire body whose existence he had never truly considered though he had shared an office with it for over a decade. Her breasts, her belly, her thighs were wholly unfamiliar; he would never have known them as hers save that her face floated there above them, strange in this context, like a full moon appearing bright in the sky at midday.
It was while he was climaxing that the image of Evelyn waiting for him at the hair salon on Boylston Street pierced the physical release surging through his body; he gasped and fell back on the couch pillows while Joanne continued to move on top of him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes closed, unaware that Ray had just remembered he’d promised to pick up his wife half an hour ago.
Alone in the house, afternoon sun slanting hot and suggestive through the open windows, Detective Slade sidled down the upstairs hall. Sweating. Evelyn had gone for her haircut, and Ray was still at work, or perhaps picking Evelyn up by now. Detective Slade stepped over the threshold into their bedroom, sat down at the dressing table, looked in the mirror.
In the mirror was a face, young and girlish despite the hacking of the hair with sewing scissors. Evelyn was right; it did look like moths had been eating it. Ingrid pulled off her tee shirt and looked at her bare breasts in the mirror. Not large, but unmistakably there. No muscular chest. Soft skin.
Ingrid reached for a tube of lipstick and on her left bicep drew an heart with an arrow piercing it. The lipstick was slippery and too fat; the arrow looked sloppy. She picked up ajar of green eye shadow and dipped her finger in, made a green dot in the middle of her chest. She drew a circle around the dot, another circle around the circle. A bull’s eye. The eye shadow was powdery, not dark enough. What else was there? Ingrid pulled open the deep drawer on the left side where she’d stolen the lotion. Among the jars of cover-up and night cream and nail polish she found a tube of liquid eyeliner. That was perfect. Thinking of the vine trailing above the fish pond on Evelyn’s arm, Ingrid dipped the tiny brush and carefully drew a wavy line beside the bull’s eye, then added little ovals on either side for leaves. So what if the leaves were brown—they were dead leaves. She dipped the brush again and painted a brown star below her collar bone. It was absorbing work that blotted other thoughts from her mind. She took her time, painted a whole dead tree beneath the brown star.
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