Mr. Peanut (37 page)

He was resting in the deep end of the pool, his arms over the edge and his chin atop his locked hands. He could feel the sunlight on his scalp. There was something about Susan today that had repulsed him. It was unfair to her, but he could no more shake that than what Marilyn had said. The freshened makeup didn’t really hide the dark circles under Susan’s eyes and she had the off-putting odor of fear and hope on her breath. When she took his arm, trying to stop him from leaving, her nails had dug into his flesh and it had taken every ounce of his control not to yank it from her grip. And even
then
Marilyn was there, when he was finally ready to act. It was like being under perpetual surveillance. Though in truth it wasn’t like that at all. It was more as if she were waiting for something from him, but what?

Later that night, well into the poker party, he called Marilyn at Jo’s. It was long distance and it was late, nearly eleven, and like everyone he was drunk. Part of him wanted to speak with her while another simply wanted her to know he was here, where he’d said he’d be. He wanted to maintain the illusion in her mind that he’d soon be asleep in his bed, readying himself for the long day to come—when in fact he’d be off to meet Susan. He let the phone ring several times. By the tenth, told himself to hang up and at the same time he thought to wait, so when Jo answered the phone he apologized.

“No,” she said, “don’t worry. I must’ve passed out.”

“Could I have a quick word with Marilyn?” He heard the clatter of the receiver dropping, a silence, a mumble, and the sound of footfalls.

“Sam?” she said.

“Hello.”

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“You woke us up.”

“I know. Go back to sleep.”

“What’s going on there?”

“It’s a party. Just a small gathering.”

“Where are you?”

“At Michael’s. It’s at his house.”

She waited.

“I just wanted to hear your voice,” he said.

“Here I am,” she said. “Here’s my voice.”

“All right. Tell Jo again I apologize.”

She hung up before he did.

He stood staring at the phone, then shook his head.

He called Susan and told her to come over immediately. When she asked him whether he was sure, he said yes. When she asked if the party was dressy or not, he could hear the excitement in her voice. A group of women had gathered nearby, so he described what they were wearing and told her to hurry. He walked to the bar and made himself another martini—the drink, he thought, he’d regret the next day—and then joined the men playing poker in Michael’s study. There were eight of them at the card table and so much cigar and pipe smoke that it looked like the felt had caught on fire. Two of them, Joseph Newton and Herbie Hawkins, were old medical-school classmates, their wives friends of Marilyn’s, and Sheppard felt a sharp twinge of fear about Susan’s arrival.

But later, when she was shown into the den by Emma and she stepped into the circle of light under which the men sat, the sight of her dispelled all his doubts. She was wearing a green dress, a matching green belt and coat, and a string of pearls around her neck. The bloodstone ring Sheppard had given her was on her finger. Out of defensiveness, perhaps, her haughtiness had returned; she was the girl she was three years ago, her original confidence and forthrightness restored. She seemed ablaze as she leaned over and put her arm around Sheppard’s shoulder—he’d placed his hand on her hip—and then kissed him, and they kept their hands where they were while she introduced herself to everyone. Her beauty drew all of their focus away from the game and seemed to embolden her further; she ran her nails gently along Sheppard’s neck while they played the next hand, then excused herself to get a drink after he folded. All the men watched her until the door closed, and when it did they passed glances between one another and then back at Sheppard, a couple clucking their tongues or half-whistling while another, a man who Sheppard didn’t know, softly laughed in derision or appreciation—he was too drunk to be sure.

“Goddamn, Sam,” Michael finally said.

Sheppard stared at the cards he’d laid on the table, then leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across his stomach. He felt the rictus of a smile on his face.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “That’s just
 … something”

Neither Newton nor Hawkins could look up from their cards, though after a long silence, Herb said, “Goddamn’s about right.”

Sheppard left the study and, passing through the living room where the women were, left a wake of silence behind him. He found Susan out by the pool, smoking a cigarette and staring at the candles that floated on the water. Slipping his arms around her waist, he kissed her neck and smelled her perfume mingling with the honeysuckle and jasmine on the breeze—Cleveland a blessed universe away.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“Of course you should’ve.”

She nodded at the house.

“No one in there will talk with me.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“To you it doesn’t.”

“To us it shouldn’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“Come with me.”

He took her hand and led her into his room through the sliding door right off the pool. And as he closed it, he caught Emma staring at him, her eyes brilliant with fury. This he was able to forget once they were alone, and even his wife and what she’d said. He made love to Susan angrily and passionately, though now it was as if
he
were hovering overhead—that his prowess demanded he be utterly detached, or like one of the men playing cards in the other room, aware of what was happening here in the dark but feeling none of it.

This detachment remained with him once he tried to sleep. He was conscious of Susan there, of her body, yet he couldn’t keep far enough away from her, as if merely sleeping in the same bed with another woman was the real sin he’d committed and by maintaining this literal separation he might bolster his claim of innocence should someone burst into the room. Or perhaps it was that he was unaccustomed to sharing the space, since he and Marilyn never did anymore. Either way, his discomfort buoyed him on sleep’s surface. When he finally looked at his watch, it was 4:15. Susan lay facing away from him with the covers off her torso, the sheets forming a V at the small of her back, the braids of her spine as discernible in the shadows as
the imprint of a fossil. He propped himself up to look at her face. He’d never woken up next to her, he realized, nor did he know her parents’ names, her middle name, her birth date—all essential facts and stories. He then was gripped by such a panic he had to lie back and drape his arm over his eyes, forcing himself to breathe slowly and deeply, slowing his heart to the point where he could begin to believe that this night would end. Over an hour later, out the window, the sky finally turned blue, a tracery of light burning along the edges of the hills, for which he thanked God. The two more hours of rest he needed were cooking the backs of his eyes like yolks and he wanted coffee but didn’t feel like foraging. So he woke Susan and told her to dress, found the keys Michael had left him to his MG, and drove her back to her apartment through this blue world of empty streets—Los Angeles in the morning feeling more like a desert than at any other time of day.

Instead of stopping somewhere for breakfast, he went straight to the hospital and was greatly relieved to see Chappie, who was all grip, all talk, taking him by the shoulder after they shook hands and squeezing it too in welcome, so hard it made Sheppard smile and go limp. Chappie was short but he felt as strong in the hands as someone twice his size. His energy seemed to run through every fiber of his body: the hairs on his arms and ears bristling with the discharge, his eyebrows lightning bolts. No matter how accomplished Sheppard ever became, around Chapman he always felt he was struggling to keep up, and as they walked toward surgery Chappie talked about the upcoming procedure so far ahead of the explanation in his mind that it came out of his mouth
in media res
. Sheppard, nodding, still felt shaky, but he reacquired focus once they scrubbed in, habit’s blessed restoration of clarity, this presurgical routine priming his brain; and once they entered the OR his fatigue and emotionality fell away, replaced by keenness, by calm. It was an open-heart procedure he was observing today, a magnificent, stirring thing to behold, the incision down the sternum and then the circular saw along the chest bone, which before being split looked, with the ribs and clavicle bones branching off of it, like the back of a giant bug. The stainless steel retractor was inserted, its crank turned smoothly, and there in that rectangular window was the heart, blanketed in purple pericardium, this protective tissue incised and these four triangles lifted away like a present’s wrapping, their ends clamped to the retractor’s rails so that the revealed organ appeared to sit on this splayed canvas as if it were in a hammock. The patient, Chappie explained, suffered from acute aortic valvular incompetence, her condition so critical she required an experimental prosthesis, a caged ball valve with multiple-point fixation rings secured to the ascending aorta. It was an astonishing seven-hour procedure
that required a degree of technical precision and reliance on technology Sheppard had never experienced before.
I could live like this out here. In joy, on the vanguard, the tip of the spear
. He was allowed to implant the replacement valve, an obscenely difficult job given the condition of the woman’s aortic tissue.

“This one’s so compromised,” Chappie said, “what we really need to do is swap it out with part of a pulmonary.”

“Where do you get that?”

“Donors,” he said. “Cadavers. Unfortunately we’ve had problems with rejections.”

When they brought the woman off the pump, Chappie watched her EKG and said, “Let’s see if this motor will run.”

The woman died on the table.

When he picked Susan up at her apartment, he was too tired to tell her anything about his day. All he wanted was to go to sleep. But Susan was hungry, and he could tell by the outfit she had on that she was ready to be taken out. Chappie had recommended a place in Santa Monica—Ernie’s, on Barnard Way—and it was a wonderful call. They sat outside with a view of the pier, the carousel’s organ sounding its plaintive notes over the glassed ocean, the distant Ferris wheel appearing to Sheppard like a dilated eye. Still, he struggled to shake himself out of his inner quiet and remoteness, the lingering detachment brought on by the hours of surgery and the night before. Out of discomfort, perhaps, Susan launched into a story about her superior, the woman who ran the pathology lab. And even while Sheppard’s attention wandered, it occurred to him that she always established someone at work as her enemy, who from the get-go was determined to limit her potential and make her life impossible—at Bay View this was Tricia—so that when she did finally leave, or was fired, she’d bear no personal responsibility at all.

“Did you hear me?” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, placing his hand over the back of hers. Though that too was like an act, a pantomime of intimacy. “I’m exhausted.” He took her fingers and looked at the bloodstone ring he’d given her, the green flecked lightly with red.

“Sam,” she said. “In your letters, you kept mentioning something you wanted to tell me when you came out here.”

“I know,” he said. All certainty suddenly seemed to have fled.

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I am,” he said. “But I’ve just arrived.”

She looked puzzled.

“What I mean,” he said, “is that I’d like for us just to
be
for a few days—to be us. Let me get my feet on the ground.”

“But you’ll tell me?” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

Dinner lifted his spirits and Marilyn was far, far away. After leaving the restaurant, they drove north along the Pacific Coast Highway toward the Palisades, then east past Will Rogers Park. Occasionally Susan leaned over and kissed him or ran her hand up and down his thigh, and his indifference and remoteness dissolved, and once again it was obvious that they had to get somewhere fast, that his attraction to this woman was an ever-burning thing, and upon returning to Michael’s house—it was late now, past ten, and no one met them at the door when he unlocked it—he hurried her to his room. And afterward, as they lay there together, she whispered, “I’ve dreamed this before.”

Then she fell asleep, starting to snore so loudly that it made him sit up. And then he began to think. Another night of sleeplessness would kill him tomorrow. But he was thirsty from too much wine and wandered into the kitchen. Standing at the sink, he downed two glasses of water and was about to turn off the light when Michael appeared. With his hands pressed into the pockets of his robe, he looked at Sheppard grimly and nodded toward the guest room. “Is she in there?”

“Susan? Yes.”

Michael raised his shoulders and let them fall. “What are you doing, Sam?”

Sheppard said nothing.

“Let me put it like this: What are you doing
in my house?
There are kids here, for Christ’s sake. We’re Marilyn’s friends on top of that. How could you put us in this position?”

“I don’t want you to say anything.”

Michael tapped his forehead. “Sam, that’s the point.”

“Well, I’m sorry then.”

“Are you and Marilyn divorcing?”

Sheppard shrugged.

“You should.”

“Michael, please—”

“Please nothing. You’re behaving pathologically.”

“I think we’ve both had our pathological moments.”

Michael stepped closer and whispered, “You’re out of line. And you need to have your fucking head examined. I’m serious. You need to see a shrink.”

Sheppard, ashamed and furious, couldn’t look at him.

“You leave early,” Michael said. “Like this morning. Take the car. I don’t give a damn. Drive yourself to a hotel and knock yourself out. But do
not
be here when Emma wakes up. Because I swear I don’t know what she’ll do if you are. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Sheppard said.

Oddly, the confrontation imparted clarity. Why was he waiting? What was wrong with him? He checked them into the Argyle Hotel the next morning.