Mr. Peanut (36 page)

“Should we drop you off at Dr. Miller’s?” she asked him.

“It’s in the opposite direction,” Sheppard said.

“I don’t mind. Do you mind, Marilyn?”

“I do if it doesn’t get us on the beach before sunset.”

“I’ll take a cab,” he said. “You girls go on.”

Sheppard had the skycap load up the car and kissed Jo good-bye.

“Is Chappie driving you up?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “On Sunday.”

Before Jo got in the driver’s seat, she said over the roof: “Be sure to tell him to go to hell.”

She was always offering this sort of public complaint. Over dinner she’d tell you how many eons it had been since they’d slept together. Its familiarity made Sheppard chuckle, though Jo didn’t: she was busy lighting a cigarette and starting the car.

He and Marilyn stood facing each other. She seemed sad again, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask why.

Then she put her arms around his neck and hugged him. “I’ll be thinking about you up there,” she said. She waited for him to speak, and when he didn’t, she searched his eyes for a moment and then she kissed him passionately. It was unlike her to be so affectionate in public, and he was so surprised that his resistance was only compounded. She got in the car and, just before they drove off, rolled down the window and smiled, at once knowingly and sadly. “Don’t have
too
much fun,” she said.

When they pulled out, Sheppard watched the car merge with other traffic until he couldn’t see it anymore.

And later, in a cab, on the way to Susan’s apartment, he couldn’t shake what she’d said. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant by it, if it was merely an offhand remark or her condoning what he was about to do, though he had no idea how she could know. She’d said it with that Mona Lisa smile of hers, both the utterance and her expression impossible to decode; and no matter what she meant or how hard he tried to relegate it to the back of his mind, it had the effect of making the world seem unstable. The palm trees outside appeared so spindly they looked as if they might topple over from their own weight, their armadillo bark splintering open to reveal jagged insides, the houses that climbed straight up the hills from Rodeo Drive seeming in danger, at any second it seemed, of shearing off and tumbling down into the road. Sheppard tried to ignore all this, writing off his anxiety as a symptom of travel, time change, and the effects of moving through great altitudes at high speed. Also, he thought, of his desire to see Susan. Anticipation this extreme, he knew, was close to fear, yet the feeling just wouldn’t go away. It was as if Marilyn had somehow banished him into a
dream, with all its mutable landscapes and attendant confrontations, each figure like a puzzle you had to put together or a riddle to be deciphered, with the consequences of failure carrying the potential to ruin your life.

It unnerved him, and made Susan’s apartment building appear even more ominously drab in spite of the blinding sunlight. It was a nondescript three-story complex on North Alfred fashioned of white-painted brick, its courtyard gated off from the street. A fountain stood dead within, the water mottled with algae. On the intercom outside, Susan had written her name next to her roommate’s—
Shaw/Hayes
—and the very lines of her letters looked scratched instead of penciled, thin and delicate as a bird’s bones. Her voice, when it came over the microphone, was an unrecognizable squawk. “It’s Sam,” he said, then waited, the street silent and empty. The Santa Monica Mountains were visible in the distance. For a moment, it was as if there was no one else alive in the world.

The buzzer sounded and he let himself in, shaking the gate behind him when it closed to make sure. His heels echoed as loudly in the courtyard as in a tunnel. A motorcycle roared past, the engine’s sound ricocheting off the walls, and Sheppard, wincing, put his hands to his ears and turned toward the source but through the bars of the gate saw only the street. Exposed hallways framed the courtyard. The apartment windows had their blinds or curtains drawn. He didn’t know what he expected coming here, just that he expected something else.

He’d expected Susan to be home, for one, but it was her roommate, he realized, who’d spoken to him over the intercom and now answered the door. She was wearing a nurse’s outfit, though her cap was off. Her top two buttons were undone. “You must be the doctor,” she said.

“I am,” he answered, though suddenly paranoid that Susan had even mentioned him.

“I’m Janet,” she said. She took his hand, held it limply and delicately, and then let her arm fall as lifelessly as the other at her side. She invited Sheppard in and he followed her, her hands banging into her hips like clappers on a bell.

“Susan’s not back yet,” she said. “Traffic must be bad.” Her voice was so flat she seemed to form words using the least effort of lips and mouth. She went to the kitchen off to Sheppard’s right. She was making a drink and offered him one, which he declined. She dropped ice cubes into a tall glass, then nearly filled it with scotch and added a splash of soda. “I worked the night shift,” she said, raising the glass in a toast. “I’m about to go to bed. Be smarter if I drove to the park and took a walk to wind down, but I never do.”

She was chubby-cheeked and shallow-chested, slack-eyed and glum.
Nearly pretty, he thought, though everything from her small torso to her pear-shaped face had conspired to keep her from getting there. Her beautifully manicured nails were painted a cherry red so dark they were almost black. When she noticed him looking at them, she tucked the back of her hand under her elbow.

Sheppard checked the time. It wasn’t quite one, but he’d been up since three that morning. “Maybe I will have that drink,” he said. “Same as you’re having, if that’s all right.”

Leaning against the counter that separated them as she fixed his cocktail, he surveyed the place. The only thing on the walls was a large mirror in the shape of the sun, the glass surrounded by jagged strips of gold-plated iron. Hanging over an ugly green couch on the far wall, it was heavy enough to kill the person sitting below it if it fell. Susan’s room—he recognized her shoes beside the dresser—was more or less an extension of this common area, partitioned off the kitchen and without a door. Her single bed sat between two courtyard windows whose venetian blinds were drawn. Only Janet’s room, behind him and to his left, enjoyed the light of three high windows, even that muted by the building next door.

“Cheers,” she said.

They touched glasses.

“How long are you visiting?” she said.

“Two weeks.”

“Susan said you’d only be here one.”

“I’m going up to Big Sur for the second,” he said.

“Lucky. I hear it’s beautiful.”

“It is.”

“I’d give anything to go up there.”

“You should take a drive one day.”

“I mean a place. I’d love to have a place somewhere like that.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“I’d just die to have one.”

“Maybe you will someday.”

“Not unless I marry a doctor.” She spun the ice with her finger again and stared at him. “Is it just you going?”

“Excuse me?”

“Next week. Is it just you?”

Sheppard looked at his drink and, half-affronted, considered his answer, but then Janet said, “I hear Susan.”

She appeared at the door, having caught it before it flung open, and stood there in the brightness spilling into the apartment’s lightless gloom.
For a moment the two faced each other, with Janet leaning against the refrigerator watching, and they didn’t know how to react. Sheppard hadn’t expected this either, though he realized immediately how much had changed for her—how terrifying this new life was—and yet how little it really had, for here he was as well. They took each other by the hands, speechless, and he was moved to see that she’d refreshed her makeup.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “Work was … ” She looked over his shoulder at Janet, still watching unabashedly. There was an exchange between them, an allusion to some agreement they’d made that Sheppard could tell, by Susan’s expression, Janet had somehow violated.

“I’m going to go lie down,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Doctor.”

She went to her room and lay down on her bed—the foot of it visible through the doorway—but didn’t close the door.

It was all so different, he thought, pointing a thumb toward Janet. Susan shook her head and led him into her dark corner, where, half-hidden, they finally kissed; and Sheppard, forgetting everything for a moment, couldn’t keep from touching her. “Not here,” she said, then whispered. “Not with
her.”
They kissed again and Susan stopped him once more. “Not now,” she said. “Just let me look at you.” They lay on the narrow bed, kissing and touching and staring into each other’s eyes, though when Susan held him, squeezing his neck so tightly it hurt and explaining how difficult it had all been, the same terrible anxiety seized him anew. Over her shoulder, he stared at Janet’s legs, visible through her door, so still they might as well have been amputated.

He sat up on the edge of the bed and whispered, “I can’t do this.”

Susan sat up too, looking startled. She grabbed his arm. “What do you mean?”

He pointed at Janet’s Wicked Witch legs. “Is she staying here?”

Susan seemed puzzled. “This is her apartment.”

“I mean this week. Couldn’t you have made arrangements?”

“I thought … ,” she said. “I thought you would.”

It hadn’t occurred to him. He’d assumed it wouldn’t be like this, that they’d have some privacy. He pinched the bridge of his nose: the flight and the drinks were catching up with him.

“I’m going to go,” he said.

“Why? Where?”

“To my friend’s house. Dr. Miller’s. Where I’m staying.”

“You’re not … I thought you were staying at a hotel.”

“No.”

“But how will we—?”

“We will,” he said. “It’ll be fine.” He put his hand over hers, his mind racing. “I promise.” He stood up.

“Please don’t leave,” she said, grabbing him by the wrist.

“It’s just for a few hours,” he said, now unnerved that she looked terrified, but he smiled and rubbed her arm. “I’ll call you as soon as I get things squared away.”

He was at once thwarted and furious. There was something about Susan’s panic that he’d never seen before, and in the cab to Michael Miller’s he thought about what to do. To suddenly move to a hotel would make Marilyn suspicious and could lead to confrontations he wasn’t ready to have, at least not yet. Yet being apart from Susan was already making him ache, transporting him back to the time before they’d ever made love, and then, afterward, to the overwhelming need to
get
somewhere. Neither was this what he’d expected, these obstacles so far from what he’d wanted.

Though on arriving, he forgot these troubles temporarily. Michael had moved to a beautiful house in Beverly Hills, a giant colonial just off Burton Way and within a mile of Coldwater Canyon. He looked hale and tan, his snow-white hair slicked back, the ridge of his long, proud nose burnt as pink as his golf shirt (he was just back from a round at Hillcrest). His wife, Emma, had laid out a lovely late lunch by the pool, which glistened as brilliantly as the day itself. The children appeared, and in four years’ time they’d grown into little people: Anne, at ten, bespectacled and bookish, was carrying
Ivanhoe
under her arm; Roger, eight, wanted to know about Otto Graham. “Is he really your friend?” Sheppard nodded. “We race cars together,” he said, then produced an autographed poster—it was Marilyn’s idea—that sent the boy sprinting to his room to hang it. He gave Anne
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
. “I’m going to start reading it right now,” she said, and ran off too.

This left the adults alone for lunch, and they talked long after they’d finished eating in the kind of place on the kind of day that made Cleveland seem like Nod.

“Number one,” Michael said, “if you moved out here, your golf game would improve. Number two, you’d get a lot richer.”

“Are you really thinking about it?” Emma said.

“I think about it all the time,” Sheppard answered.

“Oh,” Emma said, “I’m so sorry Marilyn couldn’t come. And now she’s going to miss the big party.”

Sheppard looked at Michael, who said, “It’s nothing.”

“Maybe not for you,” she said. “You don’t do any of the work.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “It’s a monthly thing,” he said to Sheppard. “Poker game for the junior doctors and their wives.”

“You make it sound like the wives are allowed to play,” Emma said.

“They could if they took it seriously, but all they do is
talk.”

“That’s because poker is so
boring.”

Michael sighed, then reached out and squeezed Sheppard’s shoulder. “Sam, if there’s a mistress you need to go see during this rare stretch of freedom, please don’t feel like you have to stand on ceremony.”

“Could I bring her tonight?” Sheppard said.

It was a joke, of course, but it would be lovely if the solution was that simple. He decided he needed a swim—a swim and a nap—to clear his mind, and then he and Susan could talk and make another plan. He changed into his trunks and strode out onto the diving board, and after a jackknife he did several vigorous laps. Happily, he’d lost no power over the years. Though even while swimming he was preoccupied by his wife and what she’d said—“Don’t have
too
much fun”—and her expression, like she
knew
. Now they were apart again, yet here he was still haunted. So much of their life was a cycle of separations, whether it was his leaving for work in the morning or being called away in the middle of the night; and it was also the women he’d been with in the past, either leaving Marilyn to be with them or using her absences as an excuse to play. He thought of Frances Stevens that summer long ago, after Marilyn had gone off to college his senior year, Sheppard looking up from under the hood of his Model A to see her standing at the garage door watching him, for how long he had no idea but with the same awareness as she walked toward him that Marilyn was
there
—witnessing this very exchange. He remembered the four-way he and Lester had with those nurses back in medical school, when Marilyn returned to Cleveland for a few weeks to see her father. Even today, so many years later, he could recall the heart-stopping beauty of the girl Lester had set him up with. Andrea: raven-haired and ruby-lipped, as black-eyed as a deer. Dinner and drinks as if he wasn’t married, and the drinking game afterward, Buzz, the four of them back in Lester’s living room, his friend and the other girl waiting for them to make some sort of decision while they all got drunk, until it was up to Sheppard to hand his glass to Lester to give to her as they sat cross-legged on the floor around the little coffee table and tell them, as they both held the cup, “Give it to her, Les.” His friend had finally put the drink down, checking back one last time with Sheppard as if for permission, and then he kissed the woman, the two moving lip-locked to the couch, as Sheppard took Andrea’s hand and hurried her into the
bedroom, pushing her down face-first onto Lester’s bed and throwing up her skirt and yanking off her panties, his hand on the back of her neck, the sounds of them all mingling while he rammed away. Yet oddly Marilyn’s face had drifted in and out of his mind, her expression vaguely disappointed when the other woman and Les appeared half-naked in the room, falling with them onto the bed and winding around one another, Sheppard raising himself up for a moment as if he were a charmed snake and they, coiled below, were the rest of his body. And Marilyn watching from above with that same look she’d shown him before driving off today. Why now? Sheppard wondered. Why
still?
“Don’t have
too
much fun.” He didn’t
want
fun. That wasn’t what he was here for. Though what he was here for wasn’t as clear to him as it had been.