Читать книгу The Fainting Room - Sarah Pemberton Strong - Страница 7

3.

Why tonight, Evelyn said aloud. She was sitting in the car in the Star Market parking lot, the dial on the dashboard reading a green-lit 1:30. She switched off the engine and rested her head against the steering wheel. She knew the answer, of course: Why not tonight?

It had to happen sometime, that she would snap and screw up completely, and tonight was as good as any other. She’d been dreading the party since Ray first suggested it—insisted, really: We have to have people over, it’s so far beyond our turn it’s laughable, we’ve been over to the Yeagers’ more times than I can count. And the worst of all: Don’t worry, Evelyn, sweetheart, I’ll do everything.

He’d meant to be kind, to relieve her of the dread and inadequacy these events dumped over her like a tub of ice water. Since her marriage to Ray a year ago it had been a constant struggle to catch up: she didn’t know what prosciutto was, or how to make stuffed mushrooms for twenty, or choose wine, or play hostess in the manner to which his friends were accustomed. And Ray’s reassurances that he would handle it had the unintended effect of highlighting all her shortcomings. The morning of the party, she woke up drenched in sweat. Flop sweat, her sister would have said. As in, the performance you’re about to give is going to flop.

It was true—things were going badly even before noon. First, Ray didn’t take the afternoon off as promised; a mistake had been found in a set of drawings, and he’d stayed late to fix them. In his absence, Evelyn had ruined the vichyssoise by puréeing the cooked potatoes in the blender until they were the consistency of glue. No matter how much milk she added to try to fix it, the soup was like library paste. Don’t freak out, she lectured herself. Don’t even start—just do it over, you have enough potatoes.

The second batch of soup was better. Ray came home, tasted and pronounced it perfect, unaware of its predecessor now gurgling through the sewer pipes below the toilet. Evelyn started in on the salad while Ray went down to the basement to choose wine. She wasn’t sure about the green pepper—should it be diced, or cut in circles? Well, she would do the tomato first; anyone could do tomatoes, without even thinking.

But without thinking, she brought the knife down on her thumb. Ray always kept the knives well sharpened and the cut was deep. She knew it should probably have stitches, but by then it was five-thirty and time was running out. If she went to the emergency room, she was liable to be there for hours, and there was still too much to do. She bandaged her thumb herself, wrapping it in layers of gauze and surgical tape, and only then called Ray to come finish the salad. She just nicked her thumb, she said when he noticed, and no, it wasn’t too bad.

“Poor baby.” Ray kissed her cheek, then began kissing her neck, her hair. “You’re beautiful, you know that?”

“No, I’m not.”

Ray put his arms around her waist. “Come upstairs.”

She half-wanted to; she was so tense, it would be good to be forced to stop thinking, forced to give herself over to her body. But it was almost six, and they were way behind schedule.

“I have to vacuum,” she said.

“There’s time. The smell of your skin is burning me up.”

“You mean I smell like sweat. Then I have to shower, too.”

He let her go, and then she wished she had given in. Instead she vacuumed while Ray maneuvered expertly among spices and shallots, making a salad dressing so good she felt again the sting of her own inadequacy. Her cut thumb throbbed.

After her shower Evelyn sat at the dressing table and tried to relax. After all, there was no sign that anything was wrong. She could hear Ray downstairs whistling some classical thing—he couldn’t be happier, so why was she so worried? She brushed her hair, checked to see if among the bright red any gray had appeared, put on foundation to hide her freckles, chose a lipstick.

As always, leaning into a mirror to do her makeup reminded her of how, as a child, she’d watched others perform the transformation: she used to peek around the canvas alley to watch the men get in makeup. Crouched on stools, close to the long mirrors so they could see in the bad light, their hands flew over their faces, transforming them with daubs of greasepaint from men into clowns. Evelyn considered the lipstick in her hand. If she made the line of her lips a good inch wider all the way around, she could be a clown too, and in one stroke of color return to where she had come from: down in the dirt with the clowns and the roustabouts, squinting up into the high reaches of the big top at three glittering blurs walking gracefully into the air—father, mother, sister. She put the lipstick away.

By seven-thirty, the Shepards’ living room had filled with people. Evelyn tried to stay close to Ray, but guests kept sweeping him away from her. Where was he now? In crowds Ray was unremarkable, neither tall nor loud. You might not notice him unless you met his eyes, which held a lightness of movement more suggestive of boyhood than a man approaching middle age. He looked his best in company: alone, his habitual expression was that of someone attempting to solve a crossword puzzle. But even then, if interrupted, he would look up, more startled than annoyed at the intrusion, and he would smile.

He looked up now, as if he’d felt her searching for him. He was standing with his back against the carved oak mantelpiece—cornered, it appeared, by a tall woman in a brown cardigan and a necklace that looked like it was made out of blobs of clay.

“Evelyn,” said Ray as she came up beside them, “this is Liz Luce, from Newell Academy.”

Newell Academy, Evelyn had been told several times, was on the National Register of Historic Places, and the dining hall Ray had designed for them had just been written up in some magazine Evelyn couldn’t remember the name of, though she’d cut out the newspaper clipping and saved it.

“So pleased to meet you,” Liz Luce said, extending her hand.

“Ray’s dining hall has made all our other buildings look absolutely ramshackle by comparison.”

“Actually,” said Ray, “your campus buildings are a wonderful example of the Federal style. Take the roof lines for example—”

Evelyn felt a prickle of irritation. When Ray got going on architecture it was impossible to shut him up. Liz Luce must have felt the same way: she interrupted.

“Honestly, Ray, I’ve been so burdened with adolescent crises this week, I don’t think I could even tell you what color my own kitchen’s painted. Thank God this year is almost over.” She turned to Evelyn. “I was on the phone with parents until eleven o’clock last night dealing with one thing and another, and now I have a girl we’ve suspended but can’t send home because her folks have disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Evelyn echoed, startled.

“Oh, not literally disappeared, not foul-play disappeared.” Liz smiled, not unkindly, but Evelyn blushed. “I mean, we can’t get hold of them. Some parents think boarding school is a sort of glorified babysitting service—just dump your progeny and go off globe-trotting.”

“There were a few boys with families like that when I was at Andover,” Ray said. “Never any place to go for the holidays. Poor kids.”

Liz looked at Evelyn. “Such a soft-hearted husband you have. That’s my problem too. Well, unless you know anyone who’d like to take a sixteen-year-old girl with purple hair for the summer, I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Thank God school ends on Wednesday.”

As Liz Luce moved off, Alex Yeager came up to them. Alex was Ray’s best friend at the firm. Tall and blonde and tanned—the only suntanned architect you’ll ever see, Ray had said once. Evelyn thought Alex looked like an aging Ken doll.

“Sorry about that,” he said to Ray, picking up an earlier conversation, “Now look, all you have to do is forget about this Victorian architecture book thing you’re writing and knuckle down on the Goldstein job. Tell Dunlap you’ll keep it under budget this time, and don’t go sneaking in things like copper downspouts.” He turned to Evelyn. “The prize-winning architect here is having a slight difference of opinion with our boss—”

“Who is standing not ten feet away,” said Ray. “Jesus, Alex, this is a party. Forget that, let me get you another drink.”

“I’ll do it,” Evelyn said, grateful for an excuse to avoid being stuck in a conversation with Alex Yeager. She took his empty glass and escaped to the table of bottles at the other end of the room.

On and on it went. Eight o’clock, nine. She circled the room with a tray of stuffed mushrooms Ray had made, a shield against conversation, until she was cornered by Gillian Dunlap, Ray’s boss’s wife.

“Everyone’s talking about how wonderful the new dining hall is,” Gillian said. “You must be so proud of Ray.”

“So proud of him,” Evelyn repeated. I’m like a trained parrot, she thought. She looked at Mrs. Dunlap for a sign as to where the conversation should go next. Gillian Dunlap was probably twice her own age, maybe sixty, but she carried herself with the quiet confidence of a woman who knows she is beautiful. Evelyn noted the waved silver hair, the small ears with their tiny pearl earrings, and felt the impropriety of her own red hair, and her ears, whose piercings were off-center because she had done them herself at sixteen using a sewing needle and a piece of potato.

She tried to smile. “Would you like some salad?”

“Thank you dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap, and put a very small amount of salad on her plate. And then, “Good heavens, you’ve cut yourself.”

Evelyn glanced at the bandage around her thumb. “I was cutting a tomato,” she said.

“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Dunlap. “Hadn’t you better change the dressing?”

Evelyn looked at the decanter of vinaigrette beside the salad bowl and back at Mrs. Dunlap’s concerned face.

“Ray made the dressing,” she said. Thinking, I didn’t bleed in it, bitch.

“Pardon?”

Oh Jesus—Mrs. Dunlap meant the Band-Aid. Evelyn turned her hand and saw that blood had seeped through; a thin line of blood had collected on the edge of the bandage and was threatening to spill down her knuckle.

Idiot, idiot, idiot. “Excuse me,” she managed, and grabbing her thumb in her other fist, she turned from the buffet table and made her way through the people who suddenly seemed intent on blocking her path to the bathroom.

She re-bandaged her finger, then sat on the lid of the toilet and leaned against the wall. Ray made the dressing—Had she actually said that to Gillian Dunlap? She wanted to run out of the house in shame. There were, she knew, a dozen other fauxs pas she had already made that evening without even knowing it. Faux pas, she had learned, meant false step. In the family she had grown up in, a false step could kill you: the high wire was set thirty feet in the air, the act performed without nets.

If only she could just stay here in the bathroom until the party was over. During the last awful year of living with her first husband, Evelyn had spent quite a bit of time in bathrooms, in the tiny bathroom of their Airstream trailer, to be exact, while Joe raged on the other side of the door. This bathroom, with its huge old bathtub and pedestal sink, was a thousand times nicer. It wouldn’t be bad to pass a couple of hours in here. She could even take a bath.

There was a knock on the door, a polite tap-tapping, and then a woman’s voice like one of the announcers on Public Radio: “Is anybody in there?”

It was Marseille Yeager, a psychiatrist married to Alex, the aging Ken doll.

“Evelyn, is that you?”

“Just a minute,” Evelyn called in what she hoped was a neutral tone, wondering how Marseille knew it was her. She flushed the toilet to buy herself time and looked in the mirror. Her mascara had smeared only a little; you couldn’t really tell she’d cried. She licked her finger and wiped beneath her eyelids, then ran a hand beneath the sleeves of her blouse to check that the rubber bands concealed under the turned-up cuffs were solidly in place. Sooner or later someone was bound to find out about the tattoos, but so far she’d been lucky and Ray hadn’t told anyone. She took a deep breath and opened the bathroom door.

“Hello, darling, it’s been ages!” Marseille held out her arms and Evelyn allowed herself to be embraced. Something metal and spiky dug into her chest. When the hug ended Evelyn saw that what had gouged her was a silver brooch with sea urchin points sticking out of it, the sort of abstract design Marseille favored. Marseille with the M.D. after her name, the Ann Taylor suit over a black leotard, the dangerous jewelry—Marseille terrified her.

“I’ve been thinking about you, Evelyn,” Marseille said. Marseille always spoke in a tone of voice that made what she said mean several things at once. “How are you?”

Evelyn, knowing that what Marseille meant was Tell me what’s wrong, replied, “Fine, thanks.”

Marseille laid her hand on Evelyn’s arm and smiled the smile Evelyn imagined she offered to her psychiatric patients. “Evelyn, I want you to know that if you ever want to talk about anything, I’m here. As a friend.”

“Marseille, have you seen Ray around?” Evelyn knew she was being rude; she didn’t care.

“He’s in the living room—” Marseille let a pause settle—“with the rest of the guests. Let’s go join them, shall we?”

Feeling like a child caught playing hooky, Evelyn allowed herself to be led along her own hallway. Marseille kept her hand on Evelyn’s arm, as if Evelyn were standing on the ledge of a building, threatening to jump. Evelyn’s tattoos, hidden by the thinnest of cotton blouses, threatened to burst into flame beneath Marseille’s cool palm.

11:00, 11:30, and at last the crowd in the living room thinned. Wine glasses were abandoned, and Ray went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee for the few remaining guests. Evelyn followed, thinking this was something the hostess ought to do, not the host.

Ray looked up from the fridge. “Where’s the cream?”

It was gone, and there was no milk, either: Evelyn had used them both up in the second batch of vichyssoise.

“We’re out,” she said, “I’m sorry.” Her face was flushing, her throat tightened. It was not the verge of tears, it was something worse than that, something ballooning inside her, threatening to break open.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Ray, oblivious, “just get me a lemon, will you, and we’ll do an Italian espresso thing with lemon peel instead.”

It was too much: he was good at everything; she was good at nothing.

“I’m such an idiot,” she said, aloud this time.

“Just pass me a lemon, would you?”

If she moved from the kitchen stool, she would scream.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ray asked, clearly annoyed now and getting the lemon himself.

She shook her head and watched him shave off yellow curls of peel, arrange them on the coffee tray with the cups and take it all out through the swinging door, leaving her sitting in the kitchen.

And then, finally, the last good–bye. She and Ray side by side at the entryway, waving, her hand going side-to-side like some kind of mechanical doll. Finally, it was over.

“An utter success,” Ray said. He plucked a last clump of lettuce from the salad bowl and popped it into his mouth. He smiled at his wife. “See? You had nothing to worry about.”

And just like that, as if he’d stuck a pin in her, she felt a balloon pop inside her, and what it contained, what was exploding all over her guts, was the full force of the shame and fury that had been building all night. Nothing to worry about? How dare he—he had no idea what she’d had to worry about tonight. Her face was burning, her chest was burning. It was the same feeling she used to get when Joe, stinking of beer, plunked himself down beside her on the Airstream’s tiny sofette and gave her a certain mean grin: if she didn’t get outside, get away from him that instant, something terrible would happen.

She took a step backward. “I’m going out to get more milk,” she said.

As soon as she said it, this seemed like the only thing that would save her: get out of the house, get in the car. Drive to a place where everything was lined up neatly on the shelves with prices on it. Where you could see exactly what you were getting and how much it would cost you.

“You don’t mean now,” Ray said. “It’s almost midnight.”

“I’ll go to the Star; they’re open all night.” There was no way she could explain. Ray, who tried so hard to be understanding, would not understand this at all.

“That’s so far away. Sweetheart, that’s crazy. Get the milk in the morning.”

“I’m not tired, and I want a glass of milk now,” she said. If she could undo just one of her mistakes this evening, she felt she would be all right.

“Are you out of your mind?” he called as she headed for the door.

She whirled on him. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?”

It was a childish thing to say, she knew, so without waiting for an answer she hurried down the drive, nearly tripping on the gravel in her haste to get to the car.

But he was right, she thought later, sitting in the parking lot. He was exactly right. I was out of my mind. Because she’d run out of the house, gotten in her car and turned on the engine. Then sat there in the driveway and thought, Even this car is too nice for me. And it wasn’t even that nice a car, not like Ray’s Saab with its real leather seats and racy engine; her car was a ten-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass, a huge boat of a car that had belonged to Ray’s mother until she died. Evelyn got out of the Olds again and stood in the driveway, not knowing what to do next. She didn’t want to go back in the house. She wandered around to the dark backyard, breaking off bits of hedge and throwing them away. The house stood quietly over her, warm yellow light illuminating one upstairs window like a storybook drawing. The house was perfect too, and she was like some bad guest, moving through it and messing things up. She stooped down, picked up two of the rocks at the border of Ray’s herb garden. She wished she had learned to juggle one of those days back in her life before she knew him: she would have liked to see those rocks arc in rainbow-shaped trails in front of her face, would have liked to feel them falling, hard, into her palms with a little sting.

Idiot, idiot, idiot, she thought, the words in her brain a tune she could not get rid of, and then she found herself turning and throwing one of those round rocks as hard as she could toward the room with a light in it, as if that yellow glow were a target. There was a crash, a faint thud and then silence.

For a second she wasn’t even sure what had happened. The first thing she became aware of was that the punishing voice in her head had stopped. She took a deep breath; the air was soft, full of spring dampness. The silent backyard opened out around her, dark and full of peace.

And then she noticed there were spring peepers starting up again, and then Ray was calling her name from somewhere in the house. His voice sounded bland, mildly curious, as if he were wondering whether she’d accidentally dropped a dish. She looked up. In the big window on the second floor, the fancy curved one, there was a horrible jagged space.

She ran around to the front of the house with no clear idea besides getting away, jumped in the Olds and drove. Ray was probably still down in the kitchen, and perhaps he would interpret the sound of breaking glass as just some curious night noise. If he didn’t go upstairs before she got back with the milk, she could get him to bed without him discovering the broken window, and then after he fell asleep she’d assess the damage. Maybe she could even keep him out of the study over the weekend, maybe she could get the glass fixed Monday while he was at work and he’d never have to know.

Fine. But Evie Lynne, you threw a rock through your own window.

In the supermarket she bought a gallon of milk and paid for it without noticing. She got in the car and drove home again. When she passed the police car on Old Adams Road, it didn’t register. Not until she pulled into the driveway and saw the lights on all over the house and yard did she catch her breath, her chest squeezing into a fist as she ran inside. Only when she found Ray standing dumbly in the study with a cup of tea in his hand and dried blood on his face and blood-soaked gauze taped over his eyebrow did she realize: he’d been in the room. She might have killed him.

“Oh, God,” she whispered.

Ray was gesturing with his bloodstained hand at the rock on the carpet, the shattered window, the smashed lamp.

“The cops think it must have been some kids from town who threw it,” he said, and sat down on the edge of the desk.

Did he really believe this? Did he really think she hadn’t done it?

“That could have killed you,” she said. She was shaking. She went to him, glass gritty beneath her shoes. She touched his cheek. There was glass in his hair. She lifted free the tiny glinting slivers, and gently touched her husband’s head. There was a streak of dirt on her palm.

Ray didn’t notice. She kissed his cheeks, lifted his hands and kissed his fingers as if she were kissing the petals of flowers. He, too, was something fragile. She unbuttoned the buttons of his shirt and marveled at his chest, at how seamlessly and wonderfully something so easily broken as a body could be made. She kissed the curling hair across his ribcage; she kissed the circle of his navel. She loosened his belt and he sat very still and let her. She undid the button, the zipper, and opened his trousers so gently he felt the lightest touch of her fingers on him like breath. And instead of speaking, she took him in her mouth as if he were as delicate as a hummingbird’s egg, and the only place in the universe safe enough, soft enough, was inside her mouth on the bed of her tongue.

Afterwards she washed and bandaged his forehead, then retaped her own cut thumb. They left the glass shards on the floor and went to bed. Ray fell asleep at once. Evelyn lay awake, gazing at the bandage over Ray’s eyebrow. She thought of all the bandages she’d worn during her years with Joe. Bandages and dark glasses. She’d fought back at times, and once she gave him a black eye; the next morning Joe had examined his blue iris swimming in a pool of red, the skin beneath it dark purple, and said, “See? You’re no better than I am.”

“I would never hit you first,” she’d retorted, and been sure of it. For a while.

Now she curled her body against Ray’s sleeping one, tried to let the easy rhythm of his lungs enter her own shallow breaths, but when she finally fell asleep, it was with the ghost of Joe Cullen standing in the shadows beside the bed and laughing at her. Leaning over her, until she felt his hot breath on her face as he whispered in her ear that the question was not, Why tonight. The question was, Why wasn’t it sooner?

There were bad things inside her; things Ray knew nothing about. Evelyn slipped out of bed and stood at the window. It was a few hours before dawn, and somewhere along the Springtime Route the members of the Jones and Wallace Big Top and Sideshow were in motion. When the convoy of trailers and trucks pulled in to the next empty field on the outskirts of somewhere, they’d fall into their beds in the Airstreams or Winnebagos or truck cabs and sleep until it was time to drag themselves out for the matinee. Would they be in Virginia this week? North Carolina? Evelyn thought of what that woman from the boarding school, Liz Luce, had said: “Her folks have disappeared.” It happened—people could be there one minute and then gone the next. It had happened to Joe: one minute he was there, her big, violent, noisy, alive first husband, and then poof—like a sleight-of-hand, like a special effect, he was gone.

Now look at your new husband, sleeping there in the big bed, his arm curled around the empty space where you lay. That man with the bandage on his head where you hurt him—he loves you. Loves you, Evie Lynne. Oh, she was lucky, she knew it. She had gone from a drunk sword swallower who hit her to a successful architect who loved her. Gone from a man who drank himself blind and passed out behind the animal cages to a man who lay on the rug to listen to classical music. It was as miraculous as anything her sister Alice Marie could do on the high wire. At times it seemed a hoodwinking worthy of Barnum himself that Ray had made her his wife, but he had—tattoos and all. He loved her and he didn’t ask much. Tonight, he’d only wanted her to relax and have fun, and what had she done instead? Been sulky and furious and acted like a freak at his stupid party, and then thrown a rock at his head and nearly killed him. Oh, the ghost of Joe Cullen was having a field day with that one. The ghost of Joe Cullen was laughing so hard he was doubled over on the floor beside this queen size bed, his big voice booming through Evelyn’s heart as if her heart were a canyon. It made her feel cold.

In the circus, whenever something went wrong during a performance, only one rule applied: create a diversion. The band would start up, the five-piece orchestra playing “Stars and Stripes” too fast, and a clown honking a huge brass horn would ride out on a tiny bicycle so that no one would notice whatever had gone wrong—a tiger wandering around the perimeter of the tent, or a fire that started on a light whose gel had melted over the bulb and ignited.

Send in the clowns—that song on the radio, and nobody but circus folk knew what it really meant.

“Evelyn?”

She turned from the bedroom window. Ray had opened his eyes and was looking at her.

“What are you doing over there?” he asked.

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again, pulled back the sheet and patted the mattress beside him. “Come on—I’ll help you get back to sleep.”

She understood this was an invitation to reciprocate the sex he’d received earlier, but she ignored it.

“Sweetheart?” Ray asked then. “What’s wrong?”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. The mattress gave slightly beneath her in a solid, pleasing way. The first good mattress she’d ever slept on. She touched Ray’s cheek. Darling, I could have killed you.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again.

Create a diversion: “Actually,” Evelyn said, “I was thinking about that girl.”

“What girl?”

“The one Liz Luce was talking about at the party. The Newell Academy girl with no place to go.”

“So what about her?”

“We could take her.”

“What?”

Evelyn took a deep breath. “I was just thinking. We have plenty of room here. Plenty of rooms. I mean, if she doesn’t have anywhere to go—”

“I don’t think a teenage girl would want to come stay the whole summer in Randall with a couple of boring grownups.”

“Are we boring grownups?”

“From her point of view, I meant.” Ray put his arm around her belly and kissed her cheek. “Come here.”

“Why don’t we just meet her?”

“The girl from Newell? Why?”

Because I could have killed you. Aloud she said, “I just think—I think it would be nice to have someone stay for the summer. It’s not exactly thrilling around here while you’re at work, you know. Maybe it’d be fun.”

Ray leaned over and switched on the light. He was fully awake now, and there wasn’t going to be any more sex. He thought about what Evelyn was asking. It had been obvious at the party last night that despite all his reassurances, she still felt she had to prove herself in the eyes of his friends. If only she were content to be herself, things would go better all around: she would be happier, and they would see why he’d married her in the first place. But she couldn’t relax, and as a result, she made things hard for everyone. Maybe having a young person around, someone she wasn’t so intimidated by, would help. But a girl who’d been suspended from school? He touched the bandage on his head, which was beginning to itch. Hadn’t he had enough trouble with juvenile delinquents this weekend already?

“Ray.”

He looked at his wife. The skin under her blue eyes was bruise-colored from lack of sleep. She didn’t ask him for much. If she wanted this, well, why not?

“I suppose we could meet her,” he said.

Evelyn leaned over him, brushed her cheek along the side of his face, his mouth. Then noses touching. Then her warm lips were all over him. Kissing.