The Fainting Room by Sarah Pemberton Strong Page B

keys. She asked no questions and paused only when he did, her hands arrested in mid-flight. During one particularly long pause while he tried to reword an awkward phrase about the Victorians’ penchant for window moldings, Ingrid retrieved a pencil from the floor and held it between her fingers like a cigarette. When she put it to her lips as if to inhale, he lost his train of thought.
    “Would you like a break?”
    “I’m okay.” She spoke around the pencil.
    “You’re an excellent typist—I think I’ll have to pay you more than minimum wage. Where’d you learn?”
    “I took typing as an elective after school last year. And I practice a lot. It relaxes me. What’s funny?”
    “Nothing—I guess I never thought of typing as being relaxing. Where were we?”
    “‘... Whose trinity fenestrations offer us a model for the subsequent derivations that became popular in the latter half of the period .’” She looked up at him. “Hey, Mr. Shepard?”
    “Call me Ray, please.”
    “Okay. Um, I was just wondering. Who’s going to read this?”
    “Other architects. Architecture students. Why?”
    “It’s kind of …I dunno, it’s kind of hard to get into.”
    “It’s academic scholarship, not a detective novel.”
    “Sorry, no offense,” Ingrid said hastily. “But hey, speaking of detective novels, when I was clearing off the desk, I saw a whole bunch of them in a box. How come they’re boxed up?”
    “Those? I just never got around to giving them to Goodwill, I guess.”
    In fact, some months before he had entertained the idea that if he were ever to leave Dunlap and Scott, he might make the study into an office where he could receive clients, and if that were so, he couldn’t very well have The Thin Man, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly and their various pulpy counterparts on the shelves alongside his professional books. He didn’t want them in the living room downstairs either, where the shelves held hardcovers of Conrad, Eliot, and Shakespeare’s Complete Works . So he’d stuck the crime novels in here.
    “Don’t get rid of them,” said Ingrid. “I’ll put them in my room.”
    “You like detective novels?”
    “Not Agatha Christie. I like the hard-boiled stuff, what you have.”
    Ray smiled. “When I was in college, I used to write detective stories myself. I even had one of them published.”
    “Wow. Maybe I’ve even read it.”
    “I doubt it,” said Ray. “This was well before you were born.”
    “Wow,” said Ingrid again, “a long time ago, huh.”
    “Back when the earth’s crust was cooling.”
    She smiled again, ducking her head toward the desk to hide it.
    “So can I see it?”
    It had been years and years since he had shown this story to anyone. “I’d have to see if I could find the magazine,” he said, knowing exactly where it was.
    “Well, see if you can.”
    Ray looked back at the sheaf of scrawled pages in his hands, but any interest he had in Victorian Architecture: A Treatise had temporarily vanished. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s wrap it up for today.”
    “I’m not tired or anything,” Ingrid said.
    “ I am tired or anything. Besides, I haven’t had lunch.”
    Besides, he wanted to get out of the fainting room. He was feeling a little claustrophobic; the room was really too small for two people to work in comfortably, scarcely more than a large closet, really. The desk took up so much space that Ingrid was scarcely a foot away from him.
    Blame it on the architects of a century ago.
     
    That evening when Ingrid went up to bed she found the magazine on the floor of her bedroom, just inside the door. Ray must have dropped it off while she was outside having her bedtime cigarette on the back porch. Ingrid glanced down the hall, but there was no longer any light coming from under their bedroom door.
    11:16 p.m. and everyone’s asleep, Mister. Everyone, that is, but me. I poured myself a stiff one and opened the dogeared report in front of me. The