The Fainting Room (37 page)
Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
Evelyn opened the car door, unaware of the riot her lips had caused in their wake. She turned to Ingrid again. “I have another favor to ask you,” she said.
Ingrid struggled to keep her voice noncommittal. “Uh, sure. Anything.”
Anything, Mister.
“Could I sleep in your room tonight?” Evelyn asked. “I just, I don’t want to sleep next to Ray. He’ll wake up and want to explain himself or something. I could sleep on the couch I guess, but then I’d have to see him in the morning. I can’t talk to him yet. I’m still too mad.”
I wished she meant what I wanted her to mean. That it was me she wanted. But I was just a hired gun. I had no business trying to make time with her. So I did the honorable thing.
“Sure,” Ingrid said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean for you to think I was kicking you out of your own room.” Evelyn laughed in embarrassment. “It’s a double bed, isn’t it?”
“Oh. Um, yeah. I mean, of course.”
“You don’t mind? I don’t snore or anything.”
“No, of course not. Come on.” Ingrid got out of the car. There was chaos in the streets inside her, bonfires lit with things that she was not supposed to burn. She went up the walk to the house, her hair alight, her skin sparking, Evelyn following obliviously behind.
“My sister and I used to share a bed all the time growing up,” Evelyn said. “We fought a lot, but sometimes it was nice, lying next to someone sleeping. Just nice, like comforting somehow.”
“Yeah,” said Ingrid, not really listening anymore, lost inside the idea of it and then the reality, the tiptoeing up the stairs so as not to wake Ray, the creak of Ingrid’s bedroom door, the bed itself. Was Evelyn going to undress, was there going to be a glimpse of tattoos again? No, there wasn’t—Evelyn took off her bra without removing her blouse by unhooking it beneath the blouse, then sliding a bra strap out one sleeve and pulling the whole bra out the other sleeve in a white satin flourish. Was she going to take off her khaki capris that hid whatever tattoos might be on her thighs? A world Ingrid had never seen mapped, a whole country. No, no she wasn’t, Evelyn was getting in bed with her pants on, saying Is it okay if I take this side?
She was lying down, red hair all over the pillow like a car accident, unaware of how Ingrid trembled as she climbed in beside her. How Ingrid lay there burning and rigid as a struck match. Liquid fuel between her thighs, dry leaves in her mouth. Not daring to touch or brush against Evelyn lest she burst back into flames.
23.
While Evelyn and Ingrid had been sitting by the reservoir and listening to Suicidal Tendencies and White Zombie, Ray had fallen asleep on the living room sofa while rehearsing apologies to Evelyn and berating himself for the sex with Joanne. He was awakened a little later by the ringing telephone, which he answered and found himself talking to Ingrid’s father. When he’d hung up, he drank three bourbons and fell asleep again on the sofa. He had remained asleep when Evelyn and Ingrid tiptoed past him, so that when he woke just before dawn, he believed they had not come back. He went up to his own bed and lay there in the darkness imagining Evelyn sitting with Ingrid in an all night diner somewhere, pouring out her heart across a plate of greasy bacon and eggs. Was Evelyn telling Ingrid about Joanne? And was Ingrid telling Evelyn that Ray had kissed her?
No, Detective Slade never rats on a client. Ingrid would sit there and keep the secret while Evelyn cried because her husband had fucked a woman who meant nothing to him. If only he could explain to both of them that he had not meant for any of this to happen. That all he wanted was to take it all back.
But that was not all he wanted, of course. He wanted to hold Ingrid in his arms, to kiss her slowly and gently, to feel her kissing him back with the singular intensity and seriousness that was what made her Ingrid. He wanted to feel her mouth smile into his with the grudging amusement he had seen come over her a hundred times this summer when she saw, in spite of herself, that the world could be sweet. He wanted to know he had not hurt her, that he could still be absolved. And he wanted— her. Ray got out of bed hating himself, found an expired bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine chest and took two of them.
He wanted to know how he could be so obsessed with this teenager and still feel sure he wanted to be married to his wife, that he loved his wife. Had he known that his wife was at this moment down the hall asleep in Ingrid’s bed, he would have thought it improper. He still knew what propriety was, what appropriate boundaries were. His heart simply refused to obey. He fell into an artificial sleep free of dreams and woke six hours later, hung over on Sominex and guilt.
In the kitchen he found Evelyn standing at the sink, her hand thrust under the running faucet. She was dressed in the clothes she’d had on the day before. She didn’t look up when he came in.
“What’s the matter with your hand?” he asked.
“I burned myself on the coffee pot.”
“Let me see.”
She shut off the water and wiped her hand on her khakis. “There’s nothing to see, it isn’t bad.”
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Not your hand. I mean are
you
all right. It’s a stupid question, but I have to know.”
you
all right. It’s a stupid question, but I have to know.”
She looked up at him then. Gray-blue shadows of fatigue ringed her eyes.
“What would you do if I wasn’t?” she asked.
He didn’t know. “Hate myself,” he said, finally, “try to make it up to you, I—”
“You already hate yourself, Ray. Is that all?”
“Evelyn—”
“No,” she said with such force that his hand, reaching toward her arm, was arrested midway. “Don’t touch me. You did this, you fix it. Either the secretary goes or I do. Decide something. Do something and that’s the end of it. I don’t want to talk to you now.”
He drove to work, Evelyn’s ultimatum ringing in his ears. All the way down Route 128 he imagined getting a private phone number and telling Evelyn that that was his new office number; then, when she called, Joanne wouldn’t answer the phone. He knew it was ridiculous. He imagined instructing Joanne to tell Evelyn, if she called, that Ray had moved to a different part of the firm. Not that there was a different part to move to. Completely ridiculous. It had been a stupid mistake and he had behaved like an asshole, but it should not be a threat to their marriage. It seemed almost laughable that the awful twenty minutes he had spent touching Joanne and not enjoying it was what Evelyn had seized on. That she was oblivious to the real problem. It was Evelyn who had packed Ingrid off to the symphony with Ray, Evelyn who sent her up to the ridge with him instead of going herself, Evelyn who had said kiss her goodnight.
He pulled into the parking garage. He would simply tell Joanne that their encounter on the sofa had been an awful lapse in judgment on his part, that she was a lovely person who deserved to find someone truly available, which he was not, and that they needed to keep their relationship on a professional basis for the good of everyone. Then he would go home and tell Evelyn they had both put it behind them, and invite her to drop by the firm any time she wanted, with no notice, just so she could see for herself there was nothing going on. That was what a sensible adult would do, wasn’t it? He had once been a sensible adult, a man who was honorable and reasonable and in control. Now he felt he was trying to impersonate that man. Like Ingrid pretending to be Detective Slade.
When he came through the doors at Dunlap and Scott, Joanne was in the kitchenette making Dunlap’s morning coffee. Ray waited in the reception area, having resolved to speak with her immediately, in private. His eyes roved over her desk with its hints of Joanne’s life scattered across it: the pencil cup shaped like an owl, the glass dish of peppermints, a photo of her cat, the framed picture of her late husband in his Navy uniform, dead at an impossibly young and blonde twenty-four. Things did not always work out. Oh, why hadn’t he gotten up from that sofa and raced out of her apartment as soon as her hand touched his thigh? And what the hell was she thinking, leaving a love note in his car? He was in enough trouble at work already. Ray felt his forehead begin to throb with the beginnings of a headache. He went into the bathroom and threw water on his face, then dried it without looking in the mirror.
Afterwards, Ray understood what must have happened. A client had come in and found the reception area empty. He’d waited a minute, then begun calling “Hello, hello!” down the hall until Dunlap was drawn from his office. Dunlap, sticking his head out into the corridor, saw that Joanne was not at her desk and his new and temperamental client, Yardley Frommer, was standing alone at the front desk.
Dunlap would have covered nicely: “Frommer, I’m pleased to be able to greet you myself.” Extending his hand, cool as ever, leading Frommer down the hall. “We’ll go over the proposal in the conference room.” He might have even said, “I know you’ll have no trouble with the zoning board this morning; Shepard’s presentations are always quite historically sensitive.”
When they reached the conference room, Dunlap opened the closed door without knocking. It was a boss’s prerogative he immediately regretted, for there was the missing receptionist, yelling
What the hell was I supposed to think, when you fucked me on my living room sofa?
And there was Shepard, waving his arms and repeating,
Listen, Joanne, will you please listen?
What the hell was I supposed to think, when you fucked me on my living room sofa?
And there was Shepard, waving his arms and repeating,
Listen, Joanne, will you please listen?
Dunlap tried to pull the door shut again, but Frommer was already beside him. Staring. In time to see Ray’s gesticulating arm backhand the mug on the table. The mug of coffee, forgotten in the quarrel, spread out across Ray’s careful watercolors of the Frommer Beacon Street Addition, soaking the lovely brick building with a quick, dark stain.
Joanne fell silent. All of them stared at the ruined pictures.
“Are those my renderings?” Frommer asked.
Ray turned from the spill. Looked from Frommer to Dunlap. Knew what to say and said it: “I’ll call the zoning board and ask for an extension of the deadline, and then I’ll draw up another set by this afternoon. Everything will be fine. The board always grants—”
He stopped. Even without seeing the look on Dunlap’s face, he knew it: his career at Dunlap and Scott was over. He was done. Even if the words he was saying might possibly salvage the situation, his position there was no longer worth the effort it would cost to restore it.
He looked down at the table: this was the coffee that stained the drawings, that angered the client, who fired the firm that was run by Dunlap, who had already given a warning to Ray, who had slept with the woman who poured the coffee that stained the drawings, that ruined the house that Ray built.
Around and around his head it went in circles while he went back to his desk in the drafting room, wrote out his resignation and drove home.
When he pulled into the driveway, he saw that the Olds was back from the shop, and that Ingrid was sitting in the driver’s seat with the window rolled down, smoking. He started toward her, then changed his mind and went into the house. His first duty was to his wife.
Inside he went straight to the liquor cabinet, poured a finger of bourbon and swallowed it neat. Then he went into the fridge for ice and mixed a proper cocktail. While he was muddling bitters and sugar Evelyn came to the doorway. She had taken a shower and changed her clothes, but she looked ragged. She was biting her lip, unaware she was doing it. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked up at him.
Ray drank off the Old Fashioned he had just mixed and poured more bourbon over the ice in the glass. She was waiting for him to say something, but in the silence of his hesitation, the stillness of the house gathered around them and lengthened and Ray had a fleeting sensation that as long as no one spoke, they were cut free from the reality of the present moment, that they had drifted back into a time when they were still happy, and that if no one spoke, they could remain there as if nothing had never happened.
“Well?” Evelyn asked, and the moment was over. Ray put down his glass and turned toward her. To make his way back toward being an honest man.
“You don’t have to worry,” he said. “Joanne and I are not working together anymore.”
“Oh, God.” Evelyn let out an enormous sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath all morning. Ray picked up the bourbon again, drank another swallow. “Oh, God,” she said again, and now tears were running down her face and he realized she had actually thought there was a chance he would come home and tell her he was leaving her for his secretary. Why had she thought that? Why had he let her think it?
“It’s all right,” he said. And then did not know what to say next to illustrate that this was so.
Evelyn wiped her eyes. When she spoke her voice was carefully even. “What happened?” she asked.
“I assume,” he said, and stopped, surprised by the round sound of his voice; he was already drunk. He tried again, more slowly. “I assume… that you wanted Joanne out of the office…so that I would not be…tempted.”
“Yes, I wanted her out of the office. For God’s sake, Ray, put yourself in my shoes. I didn’t want you seeing her every day, ten or twelve hours a day, while I hang around here waxing the floors and wondering how you’re spending your lunch hour.”
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