Mr. Peanut (35 page)

“Right away?”

“Yes.”

“No questions asked?”

“Yes.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I think you know.”

“Then say it.”

“You tell me.”

“I’m in love with Bob.”

He jumped up behind her, staring at her in the glass. “How can you be in love with Bob and be here with me?”

“How can you be in love with your wife and be here with me?”

“I guess you love Bob like I love my wife.”

But he regretted having said this as he drove back to the hospital—a weak man’s line, strictly expedient. Worse, it was a lie. They were slipping more and more often into argument. And he didn’t want to talk about his marriage in Susan’s presence. His love for Marilyn should be sacrosanct. Yet who, then, was he to speak about love?

He loved Sunday afternoons in the fall when he could work on the boat, fix the stairs to the landing, or paint the fascia boards. He loved these chores because he could get them
done
—unlike the steady stream of things at the hospital, the endless revolving of the sick, the patched, and their return—and then he could drink beer in the afternoon and sit without the remotest chance of interruption, dozing on the daybed to the drone of the Indians or Browns on the radio, as pleasant as falling asleep to the sound of his parents talking during the long family car trips they used to take. In October, the tree leaves leading down to the water were curled up and bone-dry, as husked and brittle as the shells of dead beetles, black leaves falling in tatters against the bright water when gusts bent the branches. The yard was graveled with buckeyes, twigs, and acorns, and the grass had long stopped growing. He was sitting in the rocking chair on the porch, slipping off to sleep, when Marilyn appeared. Wearing her thick school sweater and jeans, she leaned against the screen facing him.

“I saw Susan Hayes today,” she said finally.

Sheppard, alert now, took a pull at his beer.

“We saw each other at the market. She said hello to me … which made me sick, really. Because why even speak?”

He put the bottle on the floor and crossed his hands over his stomach, rocking back and forth.

“You didn’t tell me she was back,” Marilyn said.

“Should I have?”

“Do you see her?” she said. “No, don’t tell me. I need a cigarette.”

She stamped through the living room and into the kitchen, checking the old hiding places behind the bread box, in the silver goblets or the clay pitcher. A glass broke. Then he heard her pulling down medical books in his study, all of which he’d have to pick up later.

Sheppard closed his eyes, then turned toward the door. “They’re behind the bowling trophies.”

She returned to the porch, a glass ashtray in hand, and took a long drag on her cigarette. It was as if her body was a jar and he could see the relief filling her up.

“Is it like this?” she said.

“Like what?”

She indicated her cigarette. “Is it like smoking? This
need
you have. Because I don’t want to smoke. No, that’s not right. I don’t want to feel so
weak
afterward. I don’t want to feel like such a
failure.”
She waited. “Is it like that?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why don’t you explain it to me?”

He thought for a moment. “Isn’t the fact that I have to explain it explanation enough?”

Marilyn shook her head. “No one knows you better than me,” she said. “No matter what you do.”

“I know that.”

“No one would ever give you this kind of … room.”

He continued to rock.

“Are you going to say anything?” she said.

“Wouldn’t that violate our agreement?”

Marilyn’s face darkened. She threw the ashtray at his head and it hit the chair beside his left ear and shattered—a sound like a lightbulb bursting. The pebble-spray hissed against his cheek. His fingertips, after he touched his face, were covered in blood.

By the time he looked up from them, she was out the door. He listened to her car start, the tires peel, and sat rocking for a long time.

He tried to feel the coagulation: the heat of new blood inflaming the wound; the rush of white cells and platelets layering beneath the cut like so much brick; the blood already scabbed, hard as dried glue within minutes.

Later, when Kokie came onto the porch, he let her lick his fingers. Finished, she lay with a thud at his feet and sighed.

If life was always like this, he wondered, if it was always this quiet, would he be sitting here now longing for noise?

She would come home, he decided. In the past he might’ve wondered; he might’ve worried or he might’ve hoped. The trick, of course, was to understand that things righted themselves sooner or later. Decisions were forced on you, or else finally made.

Marriage was a long wait.

One evening in late November, Susan called him at home. Marilyn was upstairs bathing Chip, and it was blind luck he answered the phone. “I need to see you,” Susan said, sounding terribly upset. When he asked where to pick her up, she told him to come to her parents’ apartment. The meaning of this didn’t register on him until he was in the car, having told Marilyn there was an emergency at the hospital. It was raining out, a terrible late-fall storm, and so cold it was nearly sleeting, the wind full of leaves that caught in the wiper blades or pressed like starfish against his windshield. When he turned into the lot at the apartment house, Susan appeared in his headlights. She’d been standing outside and was soaked, and when she got in the car it made the interior feel colder. She was sobbing.

He drove, though he didn’t need to go far. On a night like this, nobody could see anything out their windows, let alone into his. He parked on a side street. It was as good as private.

“Bob and I, we’re not … ” She wept again. “We’re not getting married.” She pressed her eyes to her arm and then looked at him. Even crying she looked beautiful. “He said he isn’t ready.” She started to laugh. “You might see how I found that funny.”

Sheppard offered her his hand.

“I want to be married,” she said. “But I want to be in love.” She took his hand and looked at him imploringly. “Do you want to be in love?”

“I do,” Sheppard said.

She pulled him toward her and kissed him. Her face was cold. “I needed to see you,” she whispered. “I needed to see you when Bob was gone to see if it changed anything.” She kissed him again and he kissed her in return, his desire for her endless and inexplicable. She pressed her hand between his legs. “And it hasn’t.”

“No,” he said.

“Has it changed anything for you?”

“No,” he said, thinking to himself: Why would it?

She’d already unbuckled his belt. “So you see,” she said, kissing him, “we’re always like this, you and I.” He lifted himself up and she pushed down his pants. “We could
always
be like this.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you want that?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not afraid to have this kind of joy.”

Joy? It struck him as the oddest word for her to use because he’d never thought of their time together as being joyous. Theirs was a brand of freedom they created and affirmed, a kind of carnal honesty coupled with an
ecstatic lack of restraint and words, words, words. He’d admired her directness, how she’d mow down anything that got in the way of having him. Even now the pleasure she took in pleasing him revealed itself as generosity, just as when hitting a tennis ball with Marilyn she could somehow magically make you play better. But joy? This Sheppard reserved for his wife, no matter what was happening—or not—between them. Joy was
her
province. Joy was the first time he’d kissed her, when he was fourteen, alone in her uncle Bud’s den, in the kind of quiet conferred on a place that grown-ups might return to at any minute. It was how Marilyn would wait to lean into him until he pressed the small of her back, her face flushed and lips hot. (Were there women you were born to kiss?) Joy was seeing a movie with her in Hollywood when he was in medical school, on his one precious day away a month. They’d planned to go to the beach but it had started to rain, and joy was sitting with her in the cool theater, feeling her arm and leg pressed against his as if the touch itself was secret. She wore short white shorts from which her bathing suit peaked out; she was tan beneath her white blouse. The movie was
Shadow of a Doubt
, and joy was listening to her explain its meaning as the credits rolled, how the director had portrayed Joseph Cotten’s character as a vampire: “Did you notice how he avoided sunlight and slept during the day?” Joy was following the operations of her mind. “You look like Teresa Wright,” Sheppard had said. “You do. You’re just as beautiful.” They sat in the theater together long after the lights went up, the attendants bent cleaning the aisles. It was telling her afterward, “You could never bore me.” Joy was delivering Chip himself during his residency. The OB had invited Sheppard to scrub in, and for sixteen hours Marilyn had labored, all her fear of dying giving birth, of following her mother into oblivion, vanishing once her water had broken, the terror she’d tended for months replaced by an athlete’s determination to get the baby
out
. This one needed forceps, and Sheppard was shocked at how hard the doctor urged him to pull, the child like a screw stuck in plaster, until the incremental give he could feel down the birth canal. “Give me everything you’ve got,” he told Marilyn. And joy was Chip’s sudden rubbery slide from her, which left Sheppard, beholding him, in a state of shock. In his hands, the newborn’s arms were free to bend at the elbows, his fingers to wriggle in the air. He howled so loud it seemed the umbilical cord, uncut, was supplying the boy with additional power and disclosing to Sheppard the limitless supply of Marilyn’s own. The boy was covered with her blood and amniotic fluid, the latter as yellow as pollen, and Sheppard, holding the baby’s ankles between his fingers and cradling his head in his palm, offered him to his wife. “I love you,” he said, all of them crying. “I love you so much.”

Joy was revealed in its utter absence.

In February, Susan called him at the office to tell him that she was moving to Los Angeles, where she’d secured a job at Good Samaritan. She was going to start her life over.

The day before she left, he took her to lunch at Leytonstone’s and brought her two presents: a suede jacket and a bloodstone signet ring.

He told her he’d see her by March.

It was all he thought about until then.

“Some people memorize poems,” Mobius said, “others famous speeches. Me, I memorize confessions. And yours, of course.”

“I never confessed to Marilyn’s murder.”

“Would you like to hear it?”

Sheppard shifted in his chair.

“It’s from the journal you kept in prison.” Mobius cleared his throat. “‘When this tragedy first occurred and for several months thereafter I gave not a thought to love, except Marilyn, and I could never love again like I did M. I’d never consider serious love again. I had feelings of remorse that I had not been more tender to M at times and that I had not taken time to enjoy home a little more.’”

Sheppard thought for a moment. “Can I tell you something I’ve learned about love?”

“Certainly,” Mobius said.

“If you love someone truly, and they love you, there’s no such thing as a confession.”

Somewhere over the desert, on the flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles, Sheppard noticed Marilyn was crying.

She was facing the window and weeping so silently that he wouldn’t even have heard her but for a brief sob, and when he asked what was wrong she said, “Nothing”—an answer she’d given him so many times over the course of their marriage that he again felt like a fool. For a while he tried to ignore her, but her efforts to remain quiet had turned into a whimper and, now frustrated, he ordered her to go to the bathroom. She hurried to the back of the plane, sobbing visibly, and when the stewardess walked by he ordered them both a drink. He stared out the window at the desert below, visible on this cloudless part of the trip. It was staggering, America’s size, and this made him wonder at the small structure drifting beneath them, a
white speck that was perhaps a house, nearly comical in its remoteness, at the end of a needle scratch of road. Who could live in such a place? The stewardess brought him their drinks. He wasn’t sure of the cause of Marilyn’s suffering, but he guessed it had to do with going back, to Los Angeles, where their adult lives had begun, the dream-state that flight brought on, and the inescapable reflex this return engendered to unspool the four years since they’d left and then take stock, examining it frame by frame for clues about the present. That strip of negative was
theirs
, but the images, he had learned, were utterly different and the contrast between them could make a person despair.

Marilyn returned to her seat and lifted the martini glass by the stem. It shook in her fingers. “Thank you,” she said.

They didn’t speak again for the rest of the flight.

Of course, the maddening thing about these episodes was their sudden disappearance; they were as fast moving as a squall. Deplaning onto the tarmac, in sunlight so bright it was painful to behold, Marilyn clutched her hat in the breeze and said, “I can’t believe we’re back!” She was suddenly so excited and happy that she took Sheppard’s arm, which revolted him as surely as if her touch were radioactive and might somehow sicken him. But she didn’t notice this, which only further disgusted him. Her mood eclipsed her ability to notice anything other people were feeling; her mood
was
the world. Months ago, he’d promised himself to ponder this feeling long enough to do something about it—to finally leave. It was why he’d come. In the meantime, he helped the skycap find their bags.

And suddenly Jo Chapman, Chappie’s wife, was at the terminal, both her arms in the air, hands waving at the wrists. “You two,” she said.
“You two!”
She wore a tight white turtleneck, riding pants, and boots; her brown hair was tied off sportingly, her face thinner, a bit haggard around the eyes, the result, Sheppard guessed, of smoking, the stress of being a surgeon’s wife, and the burden of relaxing all the time. She hugged him with that equestrian’s strength, power he could feel straight from her core, then held him at arm’s length to look at him. “Still a handsome dog,” she said, then turned to Marilyn. “Emphasis on
dog.”
It made Marilyn laugh. And Sheppard, smiling inwardly, realized that Jo had always held him at arm’s length. He was a man, she always had to remind him, and in her book men were almost entirely fools. She and Marilyn would be better off without them. Or perhaps it was that in their lives as a foursome—Jo, Chappie, Marilyn, and Sam—she always felt compelled to stress that loyalty-wise, Marilyn came first.