The Faint

Freddy Python was a well-known developer around Boston, always putting together real-estate packages that, though they seldom came to anything, somehow kept him in sports cars, tailored suits and attractive women. He lived with his mother and a Filipino servant in a choice slice of house on the good side of Beacon Hill. His first and only marriage had ended quickly, without children. In the decade since, he had almost forgotten this wife; she was the most distant figure in a long line of women he had escorted and seduced, enjoyed spats and vacations with, got sunburned and frostbitten with, loved and forgotten each in her turn. In his memory, the succession was clamorous and indignant, like the Complaints line in a department store, with a few conspicuously silent, sullen sufferers hoping to make their case that way. Freddy had finessed them all: the weeper, the screamer, the tedious reasoner, the holder of heated silences. At the end of a date, however fraught, he would skillfully sail his Porsche through the bright morass of Park Square and the erratic rapids of Charles Street traffic, tack uphill into his narrow alley and nose the car to safety in its space below his mother's window. He would let himself in softly and ascend the carpeted stairs to his bedroom, a vast master bedroom that floated, all puffs and pillows and matching satin, like a dulcet blimp above the contagion of the city and its dreams. The Filipino would have turned his coverlet down. His mother would have left him a note, saying, "The mayor called" or "Don't forget your lecithin." Freddy would undress, checking his gym-hardened body for signs of wear in the full-length mirror before unfolding his pajamas. Composing his pajamaed self for sleep, he closed his eyes and folded his mind around the evening's seized pleasures. His trophies were about him, from the framed citation of the Charlestown Realty Board to the plated statuette signifying second prize in the Maiden Teens Tennis Competition in 1959. His mother was below him. The Hill was quiet but for the burst of a muffler or the scampering footsteps of a mugging. Corinna (or whoever) was alone in her (rumpled) bed. Freddy was alone in his. What a life.

Corinna. Perhaps they had played out their string. He was of two minds about her, and she was of two minds about everything. A tallish, staring blonde of at least 25, with an ass like two moons, she looked good with Freddy in public, yet she avoided going out. She said she hated crowds. He would appear at her apartment in flared chalk stripes and polished Guccis and find her in the bathtub, drugged by the steam. Around midnight, he would manage to organize her into walking over to Boylston Street for a cheeseburger. Or they would wind up sharing a sweet-and-sour-chicken TV dinner by the fireplace-- she had no wood, so they set a reluctant blaze of rolled-up newspapers kept compact with rubber bands-- while old jazz singles tumbled from WGBH on the bookshelf. She took dictation all day and after work seemed to need to express herself, to rotate languidly through her two rooms, shedding clothes and emptying ashtrays in a kind of monolog of slow motion, developing her own space. Freddy tossed the theater tickets they didn't use into the greasy blue flames and announced, "There's twenty-two bucks up the chimney."

"Did you really want to go? Wasn't this nicer? Just us?"

"We can be just us any time. We can only see The Belle of Amherst this week."

"Freddy, you really did want to go. I'm sorry, I was just so tired, I still (continued on page 276)The Faint(continued from page 208) haven't recovered from that all-male As You Like It."

"You loved Equus."

"I didn't love it, I just loved the way it was only two acts."

"You said you liked the horses' heads."

In mock consolation, Corinna, clad in only an apron, bent low over him, her breasts half lit by the same firelight that was flickering in the empty compartments of the tin-foil tray of their TV dinner. "I did like the horses' heads, Freddy. And the way they made the stage spin to show neurosis. I'll go. Let's go tomorrow night. Can you get tickets again? I'll pay this time."

Actually, Freddy had not planned to see her tomorrow night. These evenings of a fresh shirt and his suit getting out of press for nothing were getting on his nerves. There was a Japanese girl, an assistant to a landscape designer he would be seeing at conference tomorrow, who had given him the eye at the last conference, though it was hard to tell with those eyes, those opaque little pools of racial ambition, noncommittal as camera apertures. Still, he had planned to leave things open. Yet if he said no, Corinna would think he didn't have the pull to come up with the tickets. "OK," Freddy said. "But tell me you mean it. Otherwise, I'll wear the denim suit and a turtleneck."

•

At least, when he arrived, she was out of the tub. But she didn't know what to wear. It was a warm spring night, windy, ideal for walking to a cheeseburger, but unsettling otherwise. She padded back and forth from the living room to the bedroom, saying, "I hate my clothes." She showed him a wool dress that was too wintry and a cotton that was too summery. Everything was like that, nothing was right and never had been, she hated to shop; if she bought something, she hated it; and if she didn't, she hated herself. When she was a little girl, her mother used to dress her up in these frilly tight party dresses and she'd take the neck in her two hands and rip it right down the middle, brrruup! Her tongue was darting about like a rabbit in the headlights; her wheels were spinning. As a boy, Freddy had had a blue Lionel model train that he loved. The locomotive sometimes would leave the track, and when he picked it up, it was surprisingly heavy and would give a tingle of excited heat to his hand; and when he set it back on the track, its wheels would spin and the armature of its heart would whir, the electrical connection made with magical suddenness. Corinna could be like that.

From the extreme reaches of her closet she produced a dress of silvery-blue, patterned abstractly in white, with a high Chinese-style neck. The Oriental touch chimed with the Japanese girl on Freddy's mind. More than once, in conference today, she had referred, with an opaque glance at Freddy, to her husband, who appeared to be an architect. No commission for him, if that was her thought. On all sides, Freddy was betrayed by hidden loyalties. First the Irish politicians, now the Japanese professionals. Corinna held the dress up against herself. The slim sheath cut of it made her look surprisingly tall. As firmly as, years ago, he had set the agitated little Lionel back on its track, Freddy told her to wear that dress. He was tired of babying her. He had had it.

He told her, "You've made us too late to look for a taxi, we'll have to walk." Spatterings of forsythia glowed in the brownstone churchyards of the Back Bay, and spots of daffodils behind the Public Garden fence. The dress's narrow skirt chopped her normally long stride to a hurried clatter. Fragrances of bloom, of car exhaust, of drained wine bottles were in the warm wind of Park Square. The Colonial Theater lobby was deserted. They took their seats in the dark, disrupting the row. By stage light, Freddy noticed a glisten of sweat on Corinna's upper lip; he touched the silken sleeve of her dress and she pulled her arm away. Gradually, the play absorbed his attention. The brave little female figure, alone on a stage that represented a spinster's house in Amherst, chatted with invisible presences, recited Emily Dickinson's poetry and called out through a phantom window to the audience. With her dark hair and plaintive, strained voice, she reminded Freddy of someone, someone very distant yet very familiar. It came to him: his wife. Loretta, too, had parted her hair severely in the middle, brushed at her hips to smooth away agitation, called out in a voice of cracked, retracted melody, laughed as if to hint at an inner soreness, been shyly stagy, had a pointed chin, had even written poetry, come to think of it. She inhabited an empty house, however, nowhere outside of Freddy's skull, for she had briskly remarried and borne two children; but this is how he saw her, breathing an aura of desertion, twitchily strumming the filaments of an irrecoverable loss. As the playwright's design proceeded to suggest that Emily Dickinson had triumphed in her loneliness, perversely choosing it, the parallel possibility unpleasantly dawned that he, Freddy, had not so much left Loretta as she had rejected him. Him.

The curtain came down; the lights went up. Corinna's face looked round as a moon, though pink, and broadly smiling. "Is it really only two acts? Isn't it stifling in here?" she asked.

"I hadn't noticed."

"You seem so preoccupied. Sad. What are you thinking about?"

The blue of the dress as it enclosed her throat brought out the blue of her eyes startlingly; it thrilled him like a spurt of ice water to realize he must dump her. Nothing to lose through the truth, then. "My first wife," he answered.

"Your only wife, as I understand it," Corinna said. "Let's get up."

He took her into the lobby and bought her a cone of orangeade. Even in this crush, he imagined, she was being admired-- her rosy high color, her cool blue stare as she sucked at the straw. Her cheeks dented in, draining the last. The warning bell rang. As they shuffled toward their aisle, she placed her hand heavily on his forearm. "Freddy. I'm going to faint."

"Faint?" It seemed a concept wildly out of fashion, like bastardy or family prayers. "Why would you do that?"

"I feel vomity," she said, staring ahead. Her rosy face had gone waxen. The crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes had smoothed away, he noticed. The weight of her hand on his arm slippingly intensified and he put his arm around her waist to hold her upright. Her legs seemed to be abdicating responsibility for her body.

"You really want to do this?" he asked, and in the silence of her response, the calm of disaster descended upon him. She mustn't fall to the floor here, to be trampled by Italian leather. He spotted a sign that spelled Ladies at the corner of the lobby, past some pilasters. "Hold tight," he muttered. Corinna was still conscious but leaning against him like a flying buttress. He pulled her toward the archway; there was no door to push through, just some astonished faces to brush aside. A female attendant the size and age of Freddy's mother, and with the same hobbling thrust, strode forward indignantly. "She's fainting," Freddy called to her, and the indignation on the old lady's face hesitantly dissolved. Corinna's weight went altogether dead, a silken ton of blood.

"Poor thing," the attendant said, and bent to share Freddy's responsibility.

In less than a second, he had appraised his surroundings. That pink door must lead to the toilets. There was no plumbing in sight, just mirrors and dollops of gilt, as if squeezed from a giant icing tube. So this was a ladies' lounge. Everywhere there were places to sit, for ladies to be faint upon, chairs and sofas. The room, emptying as the second warning bell sounded, still held women, perhaps a dozen; they formed an audience as Freddy and the motherly attendant lowered Corinna's utterly limp and ponderous body onto the nearest receptacle, a chaise longue covered with blue stripes that complemented the skyey pallors of her dress.

She was out cold, and looked lovely. Displayed thus on the dainty chaise, her long legs trailing to the floor, she had grown huge in unconsciousness. Bent above her, Freddy felt himself engorged by pride. She was his, his, with her wide hips tugging the dress into horizontal wrinkles and her hands flopped palm up at the end of arms longer than swans' necks and her oblivious face impassive and wide as that of a Mayan idol. Only he, in the audience gathered around her body, knew her name; it, and all of the trivial facts with which she might have described herself, had sunk into the depths of her sudden, majestic abdication. He was one of these details and he, too, with his money and his mother and his cunning, his maddening resistance to marriage, had sunk with them, without a trace; he had ceased to grieve her, he was lost within her, as within the universe. How big she was, his doll! How beautiful and mysterious! The inside of his chest felt crammed, scraped, distended. In panic, he wanted to call her back into being, from behind her face, this untouchable mask with a strand of disarrayed hair pasted to one cheek, lest it find peace too blissful and begin to decompose. He was inside her, somehow, every detail of him down to his mediocre record at Colgate and his father's humiliating shoe store. He wanted to see her lips move, her eyelids flutter. He wanted to be allowed to put their lives back on the track.

The attendant thrust some smelling salts under Corinna's nose. The rapt face grimaced and then, in an instant, beaded all over with sweat. The watching women greeted this prodigy with murmurs, and Freddy, as somehow its father, took their applause as a compliment to himself. Exercising his prerogatives, he bent a shade closer, and Corinna's nostrils perceptibly narrowed. The ammonium carbonate was reapplied, and this time her soul pushed through the maze of her physiology and popped her eyes open. "Oh" was her single word. Her eyes in fright searched all their faces until they found his, and closed. Her hand, however, lingered to brush aside the strand now tickling her cheek. In ten minutes, she was ready to walk out into the air.

The second act, he supposed, would have been much like the first.

She said it was the dress; that dress made her feel, the cut of it and fabric both, closed in, which is why she had put it, though she knew it was flattering, at the back of her closet.

They were married in the open, on a site where some slums had been cleared as part of one of Freddy's packages.

"Corinna, clad in only an apron, bent low over him, her breasts half lit by the flickering fire."