The Fainting Room (43 page)
Authors: Sarah Pemberton Strong
It had been just as she would have imagined making love to Ingrid would be, had she ever imagined such a thing, which she had not: soft and tough and delightful and weird, all at the same time. There was Ingrid’s rough-shaven head and Ingrid’s smooth body, all that smooth skin—it had soothed her, eased her, caressed her down into an altered state of peaceful release. Taught her that anything could still happen after all.
But that was last night. In the darkness of last night in a strange motel room, what they had done could be a thing unto itself, a private act that did not need to carry any meaning beyond the hours it had lasted. But Evelyn knew that once she pulled back the curtains and Ingrid woke up, it would start to get complicated.
She had needed that love and returned it gratefully, but now it was morning and she had the rest of her life to deal with, beginning with the man asleep on the other side of the wall.
She opened the door quietly so as not to wake Ingrid and went next door to number twenty-two. Ray was still asleep as well. From the towels hung over the chair beside him and his clothes piled on the floor, she gathered that he had woken up once already and taken a shower and then got back in bed. That was good. That was not something Joe would ever do.
But as soon as she thought this, she was struck by the irrelevancy of comparing the two men. Something had changed in the night. What was it? There was an ease, a release she was feeling that was new. What was different? Evelyn sat down on the edge of the bed, got up again, paced a bit. She hung the towels back on the towel racks and threw away a washcloth caked with dried blood. She washed her face, inspected her swollen lip and ran her hands through her hair in place of a comb. Then she sat down beside Ray’s sleeping body and realized what had changed.
She had forgiven him. Without going down the checklist of wrongs—the affair with Joanne, quitting his job, lying to her, going on a binge drunk—she had forgiven him, for something more than these, something that both encompassed the list and rendered it meaningless. She had forgiven him for not having saved her. When she married him, she had truly believed that their union would unify
her
, that he would bind up all her old wounds and care for her until they had healed. It had not happened, and it was not his fault. He had given her what she’d wished for, security and space; and he had given her what she had not even dreamed of as well—he had given her love. Love mixed, perhaps, with a subtle need to mold her, as she had tried to mold herself, into a citizen of his world, but it was love nonetheless. And it had not been enough.
her
, that he would bind up all her old wounds and care for her until they had healed. It had not happened, and it was not his fault. He had given her what she’d wished for, security and space; and he had given her what she had not even dreamed of as well—he had given her love. Love mixed, perhaps, with a subtle need to mold her, as she had tried to mold herself, into a citizen of his world, but it was love nonetheless. And it had not been enough.
She did not feel ready to know this, sitting in a dumb motel in the middle of nowhere, but there it was.
Evelyn stood up, feeling lost. She unwrapped the bathroom drinking glass from its paper wrapper and turned on the tap, swallowed some chlorine-tasting water. Then opened the door and stood in the doorway, feeling the beginnings of the morning. The air on her face was fresh with last night’s rain, and cool.
Then the door of number twenty-one opened, and Ingrid came out. She was dressed but barefoot, bed-rumpled, her face broken open by a grin.
“Well, there you are, Evelyn.” Wide open, Ingrid’s face was astonishingly young this morning, her brown eyes shining, her round cheeks flushed from sleep.
“Hey. Good morning.” Evelyn tried a smile that didn’t come out so well. Ingrid didn’t notice. Ingrid wanted to kiss her again, right here, right now. Evelyn felt a sharp stab of guilt. She had not counted on this.
Behind her, in Ray’s room, the bedsprings creaked. Their voices had woken him up. Evelyn stepped all the way out of the cabin and pulled the door shut behind her.
Ingrid gazed up at Evelyn. “You want some coffee?” she asked. “We can get some coffee in the office, I bet.”
“Not now. Ray’s awake. I need to talk to you first.”
“So talk.” Ingrid leaned against the fake log front of the cabin and linked her arm through Evelyn’s. Happiness radiated from her skin, it glazed her eyes.
Evelyn slid her arm free again. “Ingrid. The things that happened last night, I don’t want you to think—”
“I’m not thinking,” Ingrid said. “I’m just enjoying.”
“I mean what happened with you and me. I don’t want you to think we’re—I mean, I guess we’d both been through a lot yesterday, you know? You’re my friend, we’re friends. But it doesn’t mean—” she broke off. Ingrid’s face had shut like a door. The happy grin was gone and a little wry smile had taken its place. She looked at Evelyn and nodded. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Then the door behind Evelyn opened and there was Ray, blinking in the morning light.
“I’ll just go put my shoes on,” Ingrid said, and ducked back in the other room.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I told her, and Mister, I was lying. But I would have said anything as long as she was still coming with me to California. I knew she’d said she’d only stay a week, but in my mind I saw us there for good. We’d get a place together, leave the past behind us, and sooner or later I’d make her love me. She was just scared, I thought, but I’d calm her down. That’s what I was thinking. I was out of my mind, I know. But that’s how powerful the secret formula turned out to be. Not X-onium. Sex-onium, Mister. I’d been radiated with it and now it was in my body forever. I had underestimated what it could do, the way it lit me up from inside and changed my very atoms. The way it split me and made me think I needed her if I was going to be whole.
I didn’t even know my own name anymore.
Then he came out of the motel room, her husband.
Did she know what he’d done, how he’d tried to sell Axtex’s secrets to somebody else? I still don’t know the answer to that one. I didn’t ask her. Her husband came out, and then there wasn’t time for her to say whatever words she’d plan ned to use to break my heart.
Instead we all got in the car and drove back to civilization. No one looked any one else in the eye or said very much and everyone kept to their own side of the sedan.
An Oldsmobile Cutlass is a big car, Mister. I sat in the back seat and felt like I was the only person left alive in the whole world.
Evelyn had thrown the mail onto the foyer table without looking at it, but Ingrid saw the fat envelope at once, sticking out between
The New Yorker
and the Sears catalog. A blue United Airlines logo on the corner.
The New Yorker
and the Sears catalog. A blue United Airlines logo on the corner.
She opened it in her bedroom.
A one-way ticket leaving tomorrow, Mister. I tossed it on the floor. It was just a piece of paper.
A one-way ticket leaving tomorrow, Mister. I tossed it on the floor. It was just a piece of paper.
But another piece of paper could be made into a ticket with Evelyn’s name on it, and another could be created so that Ingrid could return to Newell Academy. But not to this house. After yesterday there was no way she could come back to this house. It was the scene of too many crimes.
Ingrid surveyed the mess on the floor—the records and books, the stuffed owl, the doll in the gas mask, Melvin and his terrarium. She wasn’t sure she could get it all packed in one day, but if she stayed in her room and tried, she wouldn’t have to talk to Ray. The man who had seen who she was and understood her like no one else in her life, a man she had kissed in the afternoon and shot in the evening, a man she loved and was disgusted by. She knew how long he liked his tea steeped, his favorite piano concertos, the contents of his closets and the taste of his lips. She knew how his wife made love.
Ingrid retrieved the plane ticket from the floor and studied the jumble of red printing. The flight was for 10:00 the next morning. If Evelyn was really coming with her, she’d better get busy. There was a ticket to buy, a suitcase to pack, a husband to deal with.
Down the hall, Ray set aside the dry toast Evelyn had brought him and eased himself over to the foot of the bed so he could look in the mirror and inspect the damage.
His left eye had swollen halfway shut where his wife had punched him, the upper lid pinkish purple, a darker bruise below. His head ached with the hangover, his stomach muscles ached from throwing up, and the top of his shoulder throbbed where Ingrid had shot him. Looking in the mirror, he peeled back the bandage. The gash was an inch long, an eighth of an inch deep.
I took a bullet.
Combined with the black eye, it made him look tough. A tough guy at last. In the mirror he saw himself smile. But the only person who would have appreciated it was Ingrid. At the thought of her, he felt a sharp twinge of pain. Not from the headache or his shoulder, but something deeper that would last long after the other injuries had healed. The nick from the bullet would leave a scar, but not a large one. He hoped he had not scarred Ingrid any worse than that.
Then there was Evelyn. When she’d brought him the toast, she hadn’t seemed angry, though he was not sure how that could be possible. She’d sat with him for a moment without saying anything, but the silence was not pointed, not dangerous. She just seemed thoughtful, and tired.
But he wasn’t sure what had happened while he was blacked out. He remembered the fight with Joanne and knocking over the coffee, remembered Evelyn blowing up at him in the kitchen when he told her he’d quit. He remembered Ingrid kissing him at the train station, and he remembered getting on the train. He’d gone to a bar at some point, and after that the details grew vague. He knew that Evelyn’s split lip had been his doing. And he’d pieced together that the gun belonged to Evelyn and Ingrid had stolen it. He had an idea about why, and if Ingrid was still speaking to him, he wanted to clear that up.
His headache was growing worse from sitting up, so he lay down again. He slept and when he woke it was to Evelyn leaning over him, stroking his good arm to bring him out of sleep. She had brought him water and more toast, with butter on it this time.
“You slept through dinner,” Evelyn said. “There’s leftovers if you want some, but I don’t think you do. You still look green.”
“This toast is fine.” He made himself sit up. His head still ached, but his stomach and his arm felt better.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m going with Ingrid tomorrow.”
“To put her on the plane.” A little wave of loss broke across him, receded, broke again. Ingrid leaving tomorrow. And here was his wife, talking to him as if he were still worth talking to, as if things could be made better between them again. He felt a rush of warmth toward her for her kindness.
Evelyn sat down beside him on the bed. “I’m going with her to California. For a week.”
“California? What?”
“You know she’s run away before,” Evelyn said. “After everything that’s happened, I think I should make sure she actually gets back to her father’s and shows up at the wedding.”
“After everything that’s happened,” Ray repeated, wondering how much Evelyn knew. No, there was no way she knew about his feelings for Ingrid. She would not be sitting beside him on the bed like this, stroking his arm so lightly with her hand.
Then she turned her face away from him and addressed the air: “Besides, maybe you and I could use a few days apart. You know, to calm down.”
She kept stroking his arm. His wife. He still loved her, thank God. It was possible he loved her more than ever. He looked at her and wondered if he saw her more clearly now. He saw, for example, that she had come a very great distance in her heart in order to sit beside him on this bed in this moment. He saw how tired it had made her. But there was something else there too, blended in with the fatigue, something he either hadn’t noticed before or else it hadn’t been there. It had something to do with her eyes, which looked peaceful and also sadder, and her forehead, which looked younger somehow. It was, he realized, an absence, not a presence—a habitual tension had left her. And she was leaving him—for a few days, she said. To calm down.
“You seem pretty calm now,” he said.
Evelyn nodded, looking puzzled. “I feel pretty calm. But Ray—” she pressed her hands to her mouth for a moment, then withdrew them. “Ray, I’ve done some things. Some things I haven’t told you.”
As have I
, he thought, and waited. What was coming? When she didn’t continue he wrapped his good arm around her, and then the bandaged one as well.
, he thought, and waited. What was coming? When she didn’t continue he wrapped his good arm around her, and then the bandaged one as well.
She remained silent, and they sat like that, on the bed, Ray holding her. Finally, without letting go, he spoke into her hair.
“Was it you who broke the window?”
He felt her body grow rigid in his arms. Yes, he had guessed right. He kept holding her, wondering if she was crying. She made no noise. At last she relaxed against him again. He stroked her hair.
“I didn’t know you were in the room when I threw it,” she said. “And I never meant—” she trailed off.
“Is that the thing you hadn’t told me?” he asked.
“Yes. No. Partly.” Evelyn drew back and looked at him. “You’re not angry about it, though? Or afraid of me?”
He laid his head on her shoulder. “I don’t think I am. Not after what I’ve done. Evelyn, honest to God, I’m so sorry. About Joanne, and about quitting, and about yesterday at that terrible motel. And about—about everything. I never wanted you to see me drunk like that. And whatever else it is you’ve done, I’m sure it won’t matter. I mean, we can work it out. It won’t change anything between us.”
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