Mr. Peanut (33 page)

“Can’t we?” she said.

He was becoming reckless.

At the hospital’s Halloween party, Sheppard decided to go dressed as a woman. He even shaved his legs, Marilyn laughing at the sight of them, at his black, discarded clippings webbing the drain. “How do you women do this every day?” he said. She did his makeup, giving him lashes long as a movie goddess, lips as red as his MG, cheeks rouged up like a drunk’s. He donned a bouffant wig and wore the most alluring dress Marilyn could find in his size. Standing with him in front of the mirror—Marilyn, as Alice in Wonderland, carried a cup labeled
DRINK ME
—she said, “Thank God Chip’s a boy.” When he asked why, she declared, “Because you’d make an ugly girl.” Sheppard drank two martinis to nerve himself and ordered Marilyn to drive, though she was tight herself. They entered arm in arm—the party was in Bay View’s cafeteria—and he picked Susan out immediately. Dressed as a man—like Sheppard’s father, in fact—she’d pasted a mustache above her mouth, put on the same round, black-rimmed glasses, and slicked back her hair. She came up to him, reckless too, for Marilyn was standing right there. “Got a pipe, miss?” she asked. “I do,” Sheppard said, pulling one from the waistband of his skirt and handing it to her. She put the tooth-dented stem in her mouth and made her black Groucho Marx eyebrows dance, then tapped his chest with the slicked end. “Now,” she said, “I’m Dr. Sam!” Marilyn looked at him, baffled and appalled. He shrugged, then watched Susan shoulder her way into the crowd. “I’m Dr. Sam!” she announced, and pinched Donna Bailey’s ass. He drank more. He mingled. He knew where Susan was at all times. Marilyn spoke to him; he spoke with others and pretended to listen, not hearing a thing. He spotted Susan dancing with a resident, Stevenson, and approached them. Even in baggy pants and a suit coat whose sleeves she had to roll up, he could make out the shape of her thin, boyish body.

“May I cut in?” he asked.

Stevenson was a tall man, fit and broad-shouldered, and Susan acted vaguely disappointed at Sheppard’s appearance. But he didn’t care. He’d waited long enough.

“He’s all yours, Doctor.”

She had a stethoscope around her neck now and she looked up at him, glassy-eyed. “You’re a
big
missy,” she said.

Sheppard was so hard he thanked God for the pantyhose.

“What’re you here for?” she said. “Rectal?
Hernia
exam?”

She went to reach beneath his skirt but he restrained her, catching sight of Marilyn watching them, shocked.

“Ah,” she said, “I know. It’s your heart.” She pressed the scope to his chest, slipping the cold disk onto his skin. “Hmmm,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be beating.” She leaned up to his ear. “I think all the blood’s in your dick.”

He pressed into her and they danced for three songs, and when he looked up Marilyn was gone.

Later, all the lights were off in the apartment. Sheppard had to hold the banister and press against the wall with his other palm to make it up the stairs. He took a piss and saw his harridan’s face weaving in the mirror. Knocking his earrings off the edge of the sink, he stumbled out and found Marilyn in the guest room. She’d wrapped herself in so many blankets they looked like a cocoon.

“You did it,” she said. “You actually did it.”

“Did what?”

“You’re fucking that woman.”

He laughed: just the thought of it. “I wouldn’t say
I’m
fucking her.”

“You decided to take me up on my offer.”

“The one to stop fucking you? Or the one to fuck?”

“And I really thought you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Well, what’s a girl to do?” he said, then swayed off to their room.

When he woke in the morning, she was staring at him from her bed. His hangover was like a pall.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I just don’t want to see it.”

Sheppard looked at himself. Still dressed as a woman, he had to get himself under control.

“Promise me,” she said.

But he wasn’t up to it.

Late that fall, he and Marilyn bought a home on Lake Road that had three bedrooms upstairs, a boat landing, and a screened-in porch with a spectacular view. Massive saucer-shaped clouds gathered low over the lake, layered in varying depths of gray, all pregnant with snow. Every body of water, Sheppard thought, was a mystery, as unique each day in appearance as a letter of the Mayan alphabet. Their move had made Marilyn happy. She’d been in a flurry of homemaking; his only responsibilities, she told
him, were the boathouse and his study. Something had eased in her; she’d become more compliant. One night, as they talked in their separate beds, he could discern the black outline of her form as she told him she wanted to try. And so, in the afternoons, after warning her, “I’m coming home for lunch,” he’d eye the sandwich and glass of milk she’d laid out in the kitchen and hurry upstairs to their bedroom. Marilyn had ordered him to buy two twins, so he wouldn’t disturb her on nights when he was called into the hospital, and she lay waiting now in hers, her body still bath-warmed, clean and odorless, her white robe peeled open like the petals of a flower. She stared out the window while he undressed, draping his coat, pants, and shirt over the chair by her bed. When he climbed atop her, she tensed and said, “You’re freezing.” They kissed. Her mouth, her soft lips and their fit to his, was as familiar as the oddly metallic taste of her nipples, Sheppard so well-versed in the sequence of their lovemaking it was like walking through their living room in the dark. She kept her eyes closed, her expression, as he entered her, always of pain. Only at the very end did he feel anxious, did it seem, her face filling his sight, that she might say something disappointing. But they didn’t speak in those brief moments after. She kissed his cheek and gripped his neck in her arms. “That was nice,” she finally whispered. He went to the bathroom and rinsed himself off in the sink, proud of his postcoital size, then dressed, ate his sandwich, and drank his milk. Driving back to work, it was as if he’d left an alternative reality, Chip and Marilyn and their lives together something he’d dreamed.

He couldn’t help but compare those afternoons to his times with Susan. Honoring her request, he fucked her now in a real bed, in the interns’ apartment the hospital had rented, four modestly furnished rooms. Privacy wasn’t a problem, as rarely were more than two interns staying there at a time, sometimes none at all, and their schedules were easily checked. He’d been wrong to fear Susan’s nakedness, to think this new arrangement would change anything. But this leisure did allow them to slow down and, by eliminating the fear of discovery, made new explorations possible. They would arrive separately, Susan now in her own car, and he would enter the silent apartment and stand in the common room until he heard her breathing behind one of the doors, already undressed, lying in the single bed with the same look of idleness she’d worn during those weeks she’d made him wait, her expression part entitlement, part boredom, and she’d be oddly slow to look at him, even as he stood over her, took her hand, and pulled her up to face him. It sent a twinge of fear and dread through his mind that she might deny him. He touched her body while she indifferently,
unresponsively removed his jacket and tie, his shirt and pants, as if to remind him that it was
she
who made these decisions. “What took you so long?” she asked one day. “I had to talk my way out of a speeding ticket,” he answered. Smiling now, appeased, she then kissed and climbed him,
engaged
, her legs wrapped round his hips, still climbing until she was onto his shoulders, this girl as thin as she was strong, his hair bunched in her fists while he fed on her little cunt. It amazed Sheppard that a thing so small could provide such delight, could supply what seemed as essential as water. He lifted her off his shoulders, placing her face down on the bed, and when she raised her ass toward him and turned around to look, the tiny spray of freckles across her cheeks and nose reddened, his cock drawn to her as if magnetized, so stiff it was as if it were a beak pressing itself out of his body’s shell. It was a feeling, as he clutched her hips, that they were in furious pursuit, chasing something
down
. He turned her over and watched her orgasm slowly bloom. She tilted her head back as if she were rinsing her hair, tears forming at the edges of her closed eyes, the folds of her vagina so radiant and wet, the warmth coiling through her torso and limbs, that when he pressed his cheek and chest to hers he was like a child lying waterlogged on the hot concrete of a pool.

“Whose room is this?” he asked after they’d used the same one several times. He was sitting in a chair by the bed with his pants on, watching Susan open a bottle of men’s cologne on the dresser.

She smelled it—wearing only Sheppard’s dress shirt—and then pressed a drop with her finger behind each ear. “It’s Robert’s.” She replaced the cap and carefully replaced the bottle. “Dr. Stevenson’s.”

“He’s not a doctor yet.”

“He will be.”

“Of course he will.”

“He loves me, you know.”

Sheppard raised an eyebrow.

“I think I love him too,” she said.

“I didn’t know you were seeing him.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

He did. They talked. They were talking now. “I think I know everything I need to.”

“Did you know that your father’s firing me?”

Flabbergasted, he sat forward and crossed his hands. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” she said,
“fire
isn’t exactly correct. He’s relocating me. To a job at Armstrong Labs downtown.”

“And why is that?”

“Apparently I’m a distraction.”

“To whom?”

“To you, silly.”

She went on, but Sheppard, dressing, heard nothing.

Back at the hospital, Sheppard entered his father’s office without knocking, though the man didn’t look up, just sat there writing reports. He organized everything in stacks whose arrangement only he knew, a brand of encryption that drove his secretary nearly mad, piles forming a buttress along the perimeter of his credenza and desk that made him seem an old king behind walls, forever safe from harm.

“Have a seat,” he finally said.

Sheppard wanted to stand—his hands were jammed in his pockets—but he detected an order as his father scribbled away. And no matter how mad he was, he couldn’t overcome that, so he took one of the chairs that faced him.

“I know why you’re here,” his father said, putting his pen down. He was gray-colored, both sideburns and mustache the same slushy mix. Despite his glasses, he’d squint when looking at you, and this made him raise his chin and appear to frown. “You’re here to talk about Miss Hayes.”

“I am.”

“I’ll let you talk. But before you say a word,” he said, “I want you to think about it. I want you to think if there’s really anything to say.”

“All right.”

“Because if you’re here to argue that she stays, I don’t see how that’s defensible. Not just because this is a hospital but because you’re a husband and a father.”

“What does that mean?”

“There’s been some talk among certain staff members. There’s some concern.”

“Are you implying I’ve been negligent in my job?”

His father waited.

“Are you?”

“I’m implying more than that.”

“Do you really think I’m that easily distracted?”

His father leaned back in his chair. “Are you having a love affair with this woman, Sam?”

“I wouldn’t call it love.”

“What would you call it?”

Sheppard considered this. “I’d say we have an understanding.”

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “That we’re very good friends.”

“Really?”

“Of a sort, yes.”

“Does Marilyn know you’re friends?”

“She does.”

His father shook his head. “Most people wouldn’t believe that. Probably the rest wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t care what other people think.”

“No?”

“No.”

His father took the stack of papers before him, knocked them square, put them back down, and folded his hands over them. His glasses glinted in the light. “Then you’re on your own.”

Sheppard waited for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m terminating our partnership,” his father said. “You heard me. I can’t work with someone who doesn’t care about other people’s opinions.” Then, when Sheppard began to speak, he swept a hand in front of his own face. “Divorce Marilyn if you wish. Leave Chip. Move back to California. You’ve talked about it before, and it doesn’t matter. You’re no longer a member of my hospital. You will
not
bring shame on this family
or
this institution. And I will
not
condone such behavior while you work under this roof. Do you understand? Go elsewhere if that’s how you want live. But if you intend to divorce Marilyn, you’ll divorce yourself of this place first.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

Sheppard waited.

“Don’t what?
Want
that? Yes you do. And you don’t. You want that, and you want to be here. You want to be part of this family, of your family, and you want to carouse. What you don’t want is to own up to everything you
want
. It puzzles me about you, Sam. It always has. It’s compulsive.”

“Don’t diagnose me.”

“You’re a brilliant doctor and a terrible person.”

“Enough!”

“If your marriage is sick, find a way to treat it.”

“Don’t
you
talk about my marriage!”

He slammed both hands on his father’s desk and leaned there facing him until—much as his father always had, dispatching all passion with his implacable rectitude, his resignation, his
discipline
—he finally calmed down.

“All right, Sam,” his father said.

Sheppard rubbed his eyes, then sat down and crossed his legs and arms. “I’m sorry,” he said.

They sat across from each other and looked out at the water. The lake appeared as wide as an ocean, yet it didn’t instill the same awe as the sea.

“You know,” his father finally said, “as I’ve grown older, my ideas about sin have changed. I used to believe that sins were things you did, but I don’t think that now.”