Mr. Peanut (41 page)

He ran down the stairs, falling at the first bound and sliding down to the landing on his ass and one palm—he still carried the flashlight in the other—and leaping right into the living room, then rolling his ankle so badly it sounded like a bundle of sticks snapping. He lay clutching it for a second, fetal, and was up again, back down on his knees, and up once more. He hopped at first, moaning when he put weight on the foot, and made it out to the porch, sure he heard Dr. Sam behind. Once into the yard, he turned and saw Sheppard standing inside—or at least a black form in a white shirt.

Down the steps toward the beach with the doctor pounding behind, at the boathouse he almost jumped the rail and thumped down the steps
onto the sand. His back cracked when Sheppard hit him, a crunch that shot right up to his neck—and the doctor was now on top of him, swinging at his face like a drunk, his arms as unwieldy and soft-limbed as if he were asleep, his grip weak. Eberling kicked at his midsection, lifting his whole body up, and pulled at the collar of his T-shirt so hard that it tore away, Sheppard flying over his body and then landing in the water behind him.

They faced each other on their knees, Sheppard’s hands at his sides. He looked disoriented, drugged.

Eberling hammered his jaw with the flashlight—a massive blow that landed the doctor face-first in the water, and Eberling mounted his back, took his neck in his arm, and twisted the chin toward him violently. “Why did
you
get to have her?” He shook him. “Why
you?”

But the doctor couldn’t hear anything now.

Eberling let him drop into the water again and stared for a moment at his bare white back. He took the T-shirt floating like a jellyfish and used it to staunch his own wound. Then he turned, gimping along the wave break toward Huntington Park, broke right, up the hill into the woods, and once he was webbed deep in a thicket, once he thought twice of being found with such evidence, he threw the shirt away and blindly climbed out.

Mobius shook his head.

“No closure,” Mobius said. “No real ending.”

They didn’t speak for a long time.

“Unless,” Mobius said, “you’re lying.” He limped to the cell door, wrapped his hands around the bars, and pressed his rottweiler’s mouth to the gap. “I’ll give you one more chance. Did you kill your wife?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Mobius let go and sat down. “On the other hand,” he said, “it’s perfect in a way.”

Sheppard had gone white with rage. “Perfect?”

“No one really knows what happened to her,” Mobius said. “Maybe not even you. Isn’t that remarkable? Sometime between twelve thirty and four fifteen that morning, Marilyn was sucked into a wormhole—whether we believe you or not.”

Sheppard picked a chip of pipe stem from his tongue.

“Only she knows,” Mobius said. “And all we can know of her now is what we imagine.”

Sheppard lit his pipe, blew a stream of sweet-smelling smoke.

“That’s true for us all,” he said.

Once Sheppard stopped crying, purging thoughts of the dead boy from his mind, he and Marilyn got up from where they’d sat and went down to the boathouse hand in hand, and already his spirits had lifted, even more so when Marilyn told him what she was making for dinner, that everything would be fine for the party tomorrow—she’d taken care of everything—and then Marilyn kissed him, let him slide his hands under her blouse and lift her up, wrapping her legs around him so he could feed on her breasts, making no excuses and not stopping him. He could feel her added weight from the child inside her, more of her all over, and it was all so different, something had changed in her some time ago, a resistance not just to him and what he wanted but to her own awareness of what she needed; it had all somehow completely broken down. She let herself down and undid his trousers, slipping out of her own shorts and panties as well, climbing his body again as if he were a tree, taking him inside her, her hazel eyes tearing up slightly and her face flushed. She let him kiss her and she kissed him back, and though he needed and wanted her now what he wanted most was to kiss her; he would have been content with that, for he’d discovered that this kiss was the same one they’d shared from the beginning, since they were children, really, their current embrace seemingly eternal, existing before and after them, as if at this moment they were themselves a buried, undiscovered sculpture of a kiss, that was, he thought, a kind of mystery, something whose particular brand of bliss—no science could explain it—bound their lives together still, and it was through this kiss they were trying to reach down deeply into each other through this netherworld, inhabiting it and feeling for something they were sure was
there
, as if they were at once two mutes lost in a cave and the cave itself.

Later, as they walked up the steep steps from the beach to the patio, Sheppard said, “The house is awfully quiet.” Marilyn, holding his hand and leaning on his arm, said, “You don’t suppose Chip managed to kill himself, do you?” Truth be told, she was a little worried. And when they got upstairs and saw Chip, she gasped.

He was napping on the daybed.

Sheppard checked the time, then massaged his temples with his hand. “God,” he said. “He’ll never sleep tonight.”

“I’d better wake him,” she said, though she was afraid to start the whole
process. She looked at her husband and he at her and their exchange of glances was nearly telepathic.

“Or not,” she said, and then they walked quietly and quickly together upstairs.

Such afternoons, he thought later as they lay in his bed, Chip still deeply asleep, Marilyn’s bed white and pristine next to them, such afternoons when the breeze blows off the water and leaves a taste of the lake in your mouth, when the tree limbs rattling against the screens becomes the world’s only sound, when the body rises from sleep and is perfectly warm or cool, made Sheppard believe in God. And not the god whose son entered history, not a god of specific instructions and protocols who rewarded good behavior eternally with afterlife or punished conversely for the opposite, which no doctor who’d seen as much senseless trauma as Sheppard had could ever rightly believe, but rather a god of
this
moment, an even more generous god who conferred on those who fought through all the obstacles of love, and held on through all of its cycles, this perfect silence, this tranquility, this bliss. He held Marilyn to him. He touched her hair. He kissed the top of her head. Never in their lives together, not even when they were children, had they made love as they had these last few weeks. Sheppard, trying not to wake her, sat up gently and stared out the window at the lake, where a sailboat bounced like a toy triangle on the cast-iron and white chop. He realized now when it had started. Not just the lovemaking, but his and Marilyn’s recycling, this new era, the
change
. It had started in Big Sur, after the long, three-hour drive north from Los Angeles, when Chappie told him how his and Jo’s life together was falling apart, Jo onto his affairs now, the mistress he kept in Santa Monica, Susan Hayes on Sheppard’s mind the whole time, whose sex for so long had seemed so important to him but was now somehow diminished, who’d panicked at the sight of the dying dog, bending over to vomit in the road. There was something so weak in her, he thought, as well as something explosive that made him even more so. Something that didn’t know the things Marilyn knew, or had always known, about herself and about the world: something so un-Marilyn. What a strange turn of events. For so many years he’d seen Marilyn in terms of lack, had compared her to other women and found her wanting, but as he drove Susan to a gas station to clean herself up after being sick he compared her—and all the women he’d been with—to Marilyn, and they all fell short. He found a Shell station a few miles down the road and Susan got out of the car, taking her purse with her, and that, too, bothered Sheppard. Why take her purse? What could possibly be in it that
she needed? He watched her walk toward the restroom, her heels clicking smartly even in the gravel, like a woman newly arrived to the party, about to make an entrance, and he realized immediately that it was her makeup she needed. She still believed, even now, despite the puke covering her mouth and chin and the sleeve of her coat, that she needed to look pretty, to pull herself together—whereas Marilyn wouldn’t care. After several minutes she emerged from the bathroom and took her seat. They didn’t speak. Their fight had permanently shattered something between them, shattered or exposed it, something that somehow called attention to the fact that this was an arrangement, their time together a last fling, a brief vacation that was almost over: futureless. They were so close to the end that even basic consideration was no longer necessary.

Don’t have
too
much fun
.

He wanted to get home to his wife.

“My purse,” Susan said when they arrived at the hotel. They hadn’t spoken the whole last hour of the drive.

“What about it?”

“I left my purse in that bathroom back there.”

Back there might as well have been Mars.

“My watch,” she said. “It was in my purse. My mother gave me that watch. And now it’s gone.”

He waited.

“If you hadn’t hit that stupid dog, none of this would’ve happened.”

Sheppard could not help it. He looked at her for a long time, then he laughed. He changed out of his horrid clothes, showered, and then made his bed on the couch.

In the morning, before dropping her off at her apartment, he took her out to breakfast. She’d asked him to, and he was hungry himself, and this would be his last chance to grab a bite before driving to Big Sur. They ate in silence. What else was there to say? By chance, there was a jewelry store across the street, and he walked her there after paying the check and told her to pick out any watch she wanted. Without hesitating she choose a Lady Elgin, tapped on the glass with her fingernail, the exercise joyless, a quid pro quo he regretted immediately, her final little
Fuck you
, and he promised himself to expense the gift, to treat it all as a write-off and be done with it. In front of her apartment she said she’d write him, Sheppard knowing full well she wouldn’t, or that if she did it would simply be to tell him what they both knew: they’d never see each other again.

“So that’s it,” she said.

She looked awful. Though she’d showered this morning, her makeup
was caked on like an extra face. He saw her as an old woman and was disgusted. What a mistake I could have made, he thought. “I have to go,” he said.

It was during the drive with Chappie, while listening to him describe how he’d completely detonated his own life and was entertaining moving to Cleveland and coming to work at Bay View (home, Sheppard thought), that he reviewed those last hours with Susan Hayes and realized the only woman he’d ever truly cared about was Marilyn. For a time, yes, others had seemed terrifically important, but that importance was bound entirely to his love for his wife and a reflection of how they’d managed to lose each other. It suddenly seemed so obvious. And all he wished for now was that Chappie could make the drive go faster so he could tell Marilyn all this sooner, so between then and now he didn’t lose her again somehow. And when they did arrive at Chappie’s ranch, he stepped into the living room where the girls were sitting by the fire, the mood already wounded the moment Jo and Chappie looked at each other, it being clear, by how the girls were seated on the couch, knee to knee and face to face, Marilyn’s right hand almost touching Jo’s left, that emergency plans had been made, exit strategies discussed—for Jo, and possibly for Marilyn herself. Women together make plans, he thought. Men and women together unmake them. No, Sheppard thought, he wouldn’t have it. It couldn’t be allowed. He’d come to a realization. He went straight to his wife. “I have something to tell you,” he told her, as if Jo weren’t even there. He took his wife’s hand.

“Can it wait?” she said.

“It can’t,” he said.

He took her other hand and helped her up and led her out of the room, wanting to put his arm around her (though she only let him take her elbow), leaving Jo and Chappie to their own decisions, guiding Marilyn through the stables, where he finally let her go, and to the fence that ran along the edge of the Chapmans’ property and overlooked the ocean. Then he told her what he’d realized: that the two of them had somehow fallen so far apart, and had been for so long now, that it seemed their resting state, that this was the source of their unhappiness and that this awareness of the growing gulf between them was not only what kept them from crossing it but also, oddly, from falling even further away.

“We only orbit each other now.”

“Be careful who you call ‘we.’”

“I want you,” Sheppard said. “I just want to feel your want too.”

Marilyn shook her head. She’d leaned her chin on the fence. “You make it sound like it’s me.”

“No,” he said, “it’s us. I’m not good at this, but I’ve thought about it. I think that if we can feel each other then it’s going to improve.”

He wasn’t sure if she understood, but he knew she was listening. If he could feel her want, he went on, if he could prove to her that he’d always be there to feel it, then they’d be complete. She’d be as close to everything to him as another person ever could be. At this point, he didn’t care how she took this or what she decided to do. So much had happened between them, he admitted, perhaps unforgivable things, but to apologize now would oversimplify the matter. They’d gone thousands of miles past things like fault. He just wanted her to know that he believed this to be the answer. It was, he said, their diagnosis.

“And it’s going to improve,” he said.

Marilyn said nothing. All she did was take his arm.

It began there, Sheppard thought, at that very moment, everything that had changed between them, and then it continued that night. He rose from a deep sleep, unsure of where he was, to discover Marilyn naked with her head between his legs (unsure initially, in fact, that it was even her), his cock in her mouth and his balls in her hand, squeezing them firmly, easing off, and pressing the heel of her hand into the bulb of his penis, spreading his scrotum taut, a generous pressure she exerted against his pelvic bone, her lips tracing out the heart shape of his glans, bottom up and top down, with a rhythm to the whole loving exercise she’d never imparted to it before, which she varied and changed and would herself decide when to finish—for when Sheppard sat up and tried to kiss her she pushed his chest down with her free hand, kneading and descending and rising on him again, as if his orgasm must be gathered from the bottom of his body’s well. He fell back and closed his eyes; it was pitch-dark in the room, but he could hear the sea and imagined lying on the sand, with Marilyn a goddess risen from the water to pleasure him as she was now, because the knowledge she demonstrated, her care and expertise, was so completely strange and divine. She stopped and then kissed her way from his stomach to neck, never letting him go until he was inside, pressing her hands to his shoulders as if he were a pinioned bird, and when he finally did come he felt the synchronous sea-wash inside her that then dissolved in a long, quiet dark between them like foam.