Ray opened his eyes. Here was his life. Ingrid at the center of it saying
Don’t
, her face dissolving deeper into tears.
Ray stumbled a step back, felt sick.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Ingrid’s mouth opened and what came out was a sob. She pressed her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room.
He heard her go down the hall, heard her close her bedroom door. Heard her crying, long sobs indifferently muffled, the abandoned wails of a young child.
He looked around the study and tried to get some bearing on himself. A hole had opened up in the pit of his stomach and his heart had run out through it. And with it, he thought, the last of his morals. There was only darkness there now, a darkness permeated by guilt and disgust and the horrible undeniable persistence of desire. Ingrid could call the police, she could tell Evelyn, she could leave forever and he would never see her again. Each of these possibilities produced the same flare of panic in his chest. Down the hall he she was still crying. In the sea of the sound of her sobs Ray sat down, put his head on the desk and cried, too, not only because he had hurt Ingrid, not only for the loss of her who he could never ever have, but for the loss of the part of himself he most cherished: the part he thought of as Arthur Braeburn Shepard, a good man.
Ingrid lay face down on her bed and tried to hold her breath to make herself stop crying. Was this despair? She did not want to leave this bedroom with its old polished floorboards for the gold shag carpets of Melvin, California. The muggy heat of green and thunderstorms for the dry browns and yellows of parched earth. She did not want to leave Evelyn who she loved so dangerously there was no way to show it, and she did not want to leave Ray who had kissed her too wetly and left a raw wire sparking inside her, in her stomach, her throat, her crotch, the backs of her knees. Ingrid got up and shut the door and then took out the bottle of lotion she had stolen from Evelyn’s dressing table. The smell of it in her hand made her heart lurch just as if Evelyn herself were suddenly there. Ingrid rubbed the lotion onto her face, her throat, then yanked up her shirt and spread lotion over the ache in her chest. She closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of Evelyn from her hands. She pushed the bottle of lotion between her legs and clamped her thighs around it. She moved against it, back and forth, back and forth until she was warm and then burning and then coming and then just dead. She lay there and imagined she was dead, and did not have to think or cry or explain or feel anything any more.
Playing dead she fell asleep.
She slept for hours. Through dinner, through darkness, into night. She dreamed she was back in Melvin and it was even browner than she remembered. Even the leaves on the eucalyptus trees were brown, and the brown haze you could usually see only on the horizon was so thick it was all around her, hanging cloudy in the air before her eyes. The ground was cracked and wavy with heat. Her father was there, coming toward her through this hot brown haze.
He came up beside her. “Oh, Ingrid,” he said dazedly, “Ingrid, look.” He gazed stupidly around them at the destroyed landscape and Ingrid understood that this was the nuclear winter she had warned him about, but she had gotten it wrong; it was nuclear summer, everything hot and brown, waterless and lifeless, forever.
“Ingrid, Ingrid,” he said, and kept saying it, louder and louder until she woke up. “Ingrid,” he said again though she was awake now. She sat up and looked around in confusion. Everything was dark and there was a man standing at her bedroom door.
“Dad?”
“It’s me,” said Ray.
Ingrid rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”
Ray didn’t answer. It was nearly two in the morning. He had told Evelyn that Ingrid didn’t feel well and had fallen asleep and not to wake her. It had been torturous holding himself still through dinner, imagining Ingrid lying upstairs not asleep at all but terrified and panicked in the darkness. Wondering whether she would come down and accuse him. Evelyn went to bed around midnight and then for the next several hours Ray had walked back and forth through the downstairs rooms in panic. Finally he went upstairs and knocked on her bedroom door, unable to spend another minute under the weight of what he had done.
There was a light switch just inside the door to Ingrid’s room but he did not touch it. He was afraid to look at the mirror of her face, which would show him what kind of monster he’d become.
“What are you doing here?” Ingrid asked after a moment.
“I came in to tell you I’m sorry,” he said.
“What?”
He came all the way into the room and shut the door, just in case Evelyn woke up. “I’m sorry I kissed you. I’m disgusted with myself.”
“Oh—” she was silent a moment, and then she reached over and pulled the chain on the bedside lamp. The room burst into brightness and he saw she was looking at him with no particular expression at all.
“It’s okay,” she said at last.
“It’s not okay—you’re sixteen years old.” Ray took a few steps further into the room and held onto the footboard of the bed to steady himself. “It isn’t okay. I heard you crying.”
“I’m all right,” Ingrid said. “It’s just—Ray, I can’t go back to Melvin.”
Ray felt a wave of dizziness pass through him. She was all right, she didn’t hate him? And she didn’t want to leave? He felt unmoored from his sense of having done wrong: Ingrid wanted to stay here. To stay here with him, perhaps kiss him again. Oh God, what was wrong with him? The desire welling up in him felt indistinguishable from nausea; he took a breath and forced himself to say: “You have to go back. Your father wants you to go home.”
“What do you mean—don’t you want me here?”
He wanted to throw himself on the floor, he wanted to scream, he wanted to kick the bed until his foot broke, he wanted to hold her.
He said, and listened to himself say it, “If your father wants you back home, you should go. You have to. He’s getting married.”
See
, he thought.
I am all right. I can do this.
“But you just said not to worry, we’d figure something out so I don’t have to go back.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray said.
I’m not so far gone as I’d feared.
“But Ray, you said you’d help me. So I can stay here.”
Did she love him, was that what she was saying?
“I mean, all you have to do is call my dad and tell him I’m helping you type your book, and we’ll say you have a deadline, and you can’t get anyone else—”
She is sixteen years old; she doesn’t know what she’s saying.
“Ingrid,” he said, “don’t do this. It’s bad enough as it is. You have to leave.”
“What’s bad enough? What did I do?”
“You haven’t done anything—my God, Ingrid, it isn’t your fault.”
Sitting in her bed under the sheet, Ingrid felt cold again. She had never seen an adult’s face tremble the way Ray’s did, as if it would dissolve like paper in water. It frightened her and she looked away; her eyes fell on the stolen bottle of lotion lying beside the bed. An awful thought came to her.
“Is it Evelyn?” she asked. “Does Evelyn want me to leave?”
“Of course she doesn’t. But she doesn’t know—” he stopped.
“Is it Evelyn you’re worried about? Because you kissed me? Look, Ray, it was a five second kiss and it will never happen again, okay? I don’t even know why it happened in the first place, and I won’t tell Evelyn about it, I mean, it’s not like I even wanted—it was just an accident, I didn’t even want—”
“For God’s sake,” he said, “stop talking like it’s your fault. It’s not.”
“Then why can’t I stay? What’s the fucking problem?”
As she said it he felt a huge tenderness crack open in him. Yaw open, a rift in the ground of his life into which tumbled buildings and cars and telephone poles and everything that meant civilization because he all at once he understood exactly what the fucking problem was: what he was experiencing was not simply a silly crush on a teenage girl, an embarrassing fantasy he’d jerked off to a couple of guilt-ridden times. It was not his cock that swelled at the sight of her. It was his heart. That is what is wrong with me, he thought. That is what is crushingly, horribly wrong: I love her.
I love you. I’m in love with you. That is the fucking problem.
“You have to go back to your father’s,” he said. Ingrid stared at him a moment, then threw herself down on the pillow and pulled the bedspread up over her head.
“Ingrid? Please try to understand.”
She spoke from under the chenille. “You can get out of my room now.”
“Ingrid, believe me, the last thing I want to do is make you unhappy—”
“Go to bed, Ray. Goodbye.”
“Can I just say one thing?” he asked.
“What?” Muffled by the pillow.
He did not know what—something that would undo the mess he was making, something that would make things all right again. Something that would make her take the sheet from her face and look at him.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said.
When she spoke he could hear the scowl in her voice. “Whatever that means.”
“And—about the other thing. I’m sorry. It will never happen again.”
“Will you stop apologizing? It doesn’t matter. Just go.”
He left, feeling a blanket of dizziness envelope him as he crossed the room, looked back at the shrouded shape of her and said, “All right, good night then.”
Then he stood there a moment longer. Long enough to realize his apology was irrelevant, because he was still wanting her to uncover her eyes and look at him, incline her head toward his, hold out her arms, and that if she had done that he would have gone to her and let her arms go around him; if she had offered her lips he would have taken them; if she had touched the mattress and looked at him and said come here he would have obeyed, and lain down beside her. And if Ingrid’s absence of invitation was all that stood between him and his own damnation, then he was beyond being saved. He backed out of the room, still looking at her shape under the bedspread, his face on fire with desire’s dirty little sister, shame.
19.
Ingrid woke in the morning disoriented and queasy. She was still wearing the clothes she had fallen asleep in last night. In the bathroom she looked in the mirror and saw dark circles under her eyes, her bed-tangled hair sticking out in different directions.
I look like a junkie, she thought, and somehow this made the nausea in her stomach seem more manageable. She ran her hand through her hair. It should be much shorter. Thug-short, jailhouse short, the pink scalp shining through. What she really needed was electric hair clippers, but for now she would use the orange handled scissors from Evelyn’s sewing basket. If her dad and Linda wanted her in the wedding they could have her in it—with a shaved head.
She worked hastily, lifting chunks of hair between her fingers and cutting at random. When she had finished, all the dye was gone and a half an inch of light brown hair stuck up in patches around her scalp. Linda and her father would hate it. Ray would hate it. Evelyn would hate it. Maybe it would distract Evelyn’s attention from the radioactive glow around Ingrid’s mouth, ignited by Ray’s kiss. Evelyn’s husband. She gathered up her hair and threw it in the trash, wiped the hair out of the sink with wet toilet paper. She sat on the toilet and smoked a cigarette. Threw a palmful of cold water in the general direction of her face and went downstairs.
Evelyn was in the kitchen, taking all the cans out of one cupboard and moving them into another. She looked up as Ingrid came in.
“Jesus Christ, girl.”
Ingrid ignored her, opened the refrigerator, took out the first thing she saw. Ajar of pickles.
“What the hell did you do to your hair?”
Since the answer was obvious, Ingrid said nothing, opened the jar. But the pungent sweet scent made her feel sick; she put the jar back in the fridge.
“Christ,” Evelyn said again. “I would have cut it for you, if you’d asked me. I’m getting my hair cut this afternoon—you could’ve come with me and had them do yours too.”
“It was kind of a spur of the moment thing,” Ingrid said. Apparently Evelyn couldn’t see Ray’s kisses all over Ingrid’s mouth. “Did Ray say anything last night?” she asked.
“Yeah, he said you weren’t feeling well and not to wake you.”
“I’m not sick,” Ingrid started, and found she was crying again. She’d thought she’d cried as much as it was possible to cry the night before, but there seemed to be an underground stream inside her. A welling up from below.
“Then what is it? Don’t worry about your hair—we can get you a really good wig.”
“I’m not crying about my
hair
,” Ingrid said viciously. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tried to get her voice to come out steady. “My dad called yesterday. He’s getting married and he wants me to come back to California for good. He wants me to just drop everything and fly back like next week and be in his stupid wedding. I tried to explain I can’t go, but he doesn’t listen.” She sat down on a kitchen stool, still crying despite her efforts.