Mr. Peanut (30 page)

As a doctor, he knew the disorienting effects of the neurological trauma he’d suffered, that it wasn’t surprising for his memories to be so jumbled, but in the end this diagnosis wasn’t much of a comfort.

Or he remembered looking at Marilyn’s punched-in face and shattered mouth and then heard someone downstairs and racing out of the room; at other times it seemed he’d stumbled into Chip’s room to check on him and
then
heard someone downstairs. And he would wonder if he’d dreamed about checking on Chip out of guilt because it wouldn’t have been the first time he hadn’t given the boy a thought.

Yet the memory could unfold in perfect sequence: the dream, Marilyn screaming, the race upstairs, the blow, the coming to consciousness, the sound of the intruder downstairs, the sight of the intruder by the patio, the race down the steps to the beach, the struggle, and then waking up at dawn and seeing his home in the morning light, and knowing that Marilyn lay dead in the bedroom. Or there might only be his dream of cradling his daughter in his hands as Marilyn watched from the water, so quietly, so lovingly, and this made him think about dreams he’d had as a boy—in his most vivid, a giant owl caged in his room burst free when he entered and he had to jam his hands into the sides of its beak to protect himself—and how the dreams were unmoored from time, were a kind of time in and of themselves. Though over the years, the events came to seem unmoored from time too.

The outline of the intruder once he came downstairs by the patio door: he was large, Sheppard’s size and build, and his hair seemed to stand straight up, a bushy crew cut. He could tell the blacked-out form had turned to see his own blacked-out form, then run from the house.

Often, Sheppard dreamed what he thought were memories of that night—for instance, racing toward the beach after the intruder, but in the dream he was practically flying, taking four or five steps at a leap like an astronaut on the moon, catching tremendous air with every stride, hitting
the figure as hard as a falcon its prey. In one dream he managed to pin the intruder down, gripping the man’s neck in his hands, but this clearly hadn’t happened because the face and the neck he was strangling were his own. “Do I look like that?” he thought. He couldn’t kill
himself
, of course, but he remembered thinking, mid-dream, “My God, this is a dream, and I’m wrestling myself because I killed Marilyn.” In any case, his double used the moment of surprise to wrestle him off, throw him back into the water, and once again raise his fist to ready a punch. Then everything went black.

He wondered occasionally if he’d killed his wife in some kind of psychotic episode and blocked it out, though no evidence supported this. In a room as flecked with blood as a Pollock painting, he had some only on his knee and on his watch, on the crystal itself, fogged with water after he lay half-submerged in the lake. True, sleepwalkers were capable of remarkably precise and coordinated actions; his father once told him that his mother had watched as he sleepwalked to the refrigerator, took out a ham, and cut the meat into fine slices. Also true, we occasionally respond physically to mere dreams; once, while he was supposedly locked in battle with his father, Marilyn heard him groan, tried to wake him up, and took an elbow to the nose for her trouble. But he’d searched his soul and could find no blood rage, even in his darkest moments, toward his wife.

Still, there was one thing he remembered with utter certainty.

It was after he woke up on the beach, half-naked and waterlogged, his shirt missing, his pockets filled with sand. He raised himself to look at his house, at their bedroom window, realizing that Marilyn was gone, and what he recalled was his first thought: there had been a time, wretched and seemingly interminable, when he’d wanted this very thing.

As Hoversten drove toward Kent, he couldn’t help reviewing his exchange with Marilyn in his mind—except in this version, after Marilyn said, “You’re a failure,” he didn’t repeat all the shit she already knew, since that kept things on a woman’s “strictly emotional” level, but instead nodded twice in consideration, pretended for a moment to take it all in, and then, in response, took his putter in both his hands and cracked the goddamn cunt’s head wide open with it.

“Or better,” he yelled from his open convertible, “I knock out some of your fucking teeth.” That would be the ticket: a hard thrust with the sole of the club right above the lip. He imagined her stunned by the blow—there were probably as many nerve endings around your mouth as on a man’s dick—before falling back. “And
then
what would be nice,” he screamed,
looking at himself in the rearview mirror, “what would be delectable, would be to step around your head, put the clubface to your ear, take a nice backswing, and tee the fuck off.” The bitch’s feet and hands would be twitching, her cheeks and nose rendered as soft as sirloin. Once he’d shattered through her brain plate and bone started knifing through the gray matter, her whole nervous system would run riot in neurological disaster. Maybe he’d pause for a moment to let her speak, though it would sound more like gargling, her words as round as a mute’s:
Fease fop, Fester, fease
. How about a cock in the mouth now? That would be like getting a blow job from a woman who’d pulled out her dentures. So how about it, Marilyn? A nice, soft mouth fuck?

When he pulled around a semi, he had to cover his crotch with his hand.

The bad mood stayed with him the whole forty miles to Kent, Hoversten completely unaware of how fast he was driving. He made excellent time, though, and got to Robert’s club an hour before their tee time. That too was excellent, because he never warmed up enough and Robert always took his goddamn money. He grabbed a bucket of balls and took some heavy divots on the range, long scalps of flying turf. He hadn’t played in a while and his short game was always the first thing to go, so he worked on his pitching for longer than usual. When you hit a pitch, Gary Player says, pretend you’re striking a
metch
. Oh, he was feeling it today! It was breezy, but he worked himself up into a good lather. He was actually drawing the ball with some control, especially when he pretended it was Marilyn’s temple.

“Some cheater’s been practicing,” Robert said.

Hoversten hadn’t seen Dr. Stevenson come up behind him, but he’d been watching him hit, his arms crossed, a true student of the swing. They said their hellos, and Hoversten could tell, even through the long, dark tunnel of his own mood, that Robert was in a bad place himself. We’ll have ourselves a game today, he thought.

On the walk to the first tee, caddies in tow, they agreed to a five-dollar Nassau, rich for a man out of work, Hoversten thought, but he’d been killing the ball on the range, especially his driver—a nice pro flight whose low, boring trajectory climbed and climbed. They flipped, Hoversten called heads, won the honor, and striped his tee shot, stepping out of the box without even watching it land.

“That’ll hunt,” Stevenson said.

“That’s a real nice ball,” said his caddy.

Stevenson put his tee in the ground and looked down the fairway. He took a half swing, then addressed his ball. “That will
hunt,”
he repeated.
Hoversten couldn’t help watching him set up. It was like a study in perfect form. Stevenson was a tall, handsome man, hyperfit, long-boned, and muscular, and his stance had an athletic geometry, with the inverted triangle of his upper body resting atop the triangle of his spread legs, the triangle formed by his arms hanging relaxed between his shoulders and ending in the triangle of his large hands. It was an Apollonian image, what with his high head of curly hair, and the ball was like one of his arrows—fired down the fairway a good twenty yards past Hoversten’s.

“That’s a dandy too,” said Stevenson’s caddie, already getting a head start on the three of them.

Hoversten and Stevenson said next to nothing to each other until the fourth hole, though again Hoversten couldn’t help noticing how down the man was. Oh yes, Hoversten thought, Stevenson was in a very bad place, but unfortunately it was helping his game—he’d opened birdie, birdie, par—and there were important matters to attend to, like not losing all the cash in his wallet and where to sleep tonight.

“Someone else has been practicing too,” Hoversten said, then spit.

“I can’t complain,” Stevenson said.

“I need a favor. Do you think I could stay over this evening?”

“I thought you were working with Sheppard this week.”

“I am. But I can’t be in the same room as his wife.”

Stevenson looked at him for a moment, then stepped between the markers and took his beautiful setup. But he backed off, clearing his throat. Number four was a 175-yard par three with water fifty yards short left, a small lake that fronted the green on that side, never in play for Stevenson, who always hit a power fade. Yet for some inexplicable reason he proceeded to pull his shot right into the hazard.

“Well,” he snapped, “I can’t be in the same goddamn room as
him.”

He reteed and blocked his next shot so far right he’d nearly have a sixty-foot putt for his fourth, then gave his five-iron such a powerful hammer-throw that it almost reached the lake.

Hoversten stepped up. The flag was tucked left, and on a normal day he’d settle for the middle of the green, away from trouble. Instead, he hit a fade over the water, the ball landing gently ten feet from the pin.

They walked toward the green, putters under their arms, caddies clanging ahead.

“And why is that?” Hoversten asked.

“Why is
what?”

“Why can’t you be in the same room with him?”

“Sheppard? Oh, come on, Les. Don’t play dumb.”

Hoversten shrugged.

“You’re telling me you don’t know?” Stevenson said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“
Susan.”

“Your Susan?”

Stevenson turned to the caddies. “Gentlemen, please meet us up at the next tee.”

They nodded with the impassivity borne of watching a million bad shots, then started walking.

Stevenson waited until they were out of earshot.

“As it turns out, she never
was
my Susan,” he said. “She was
his
Susan.”

Oh, Hoversten thought. “Oh,” he said, shaking his head. Oh, Sam. You goddamn
dog
. For a moment he quantified the long line of women Sheppard had bedded, and they were all of them—but Susan Hayes in particular—a breed apart. “For how long?”

“Long before we’d gotten together and the whole time after.”

“Even after you were engaged?”

Stevenson nodded.

Hoversten whistled, his only hope to keep from laughing. “Son of a
bitch,”
he said.

“You’ve got that right.”

There was nothing else to do upon hearing such news but concentrate on one’s putt. Hoversten had a downhill slider for birdie, but Stevenson, after a terrible lag, had a fifteen-footer for a double. Feeling dandy now, he got aggressive and might well have raced his putt off the green, but luckily the ball hit the back of the cup, hopped once in the air, and came to rest less than a foot behind the hole. The momentum is shifting, he thought.

After two-putting, Stevenson walked up to Hoversten and tapped out a pitch mark. It was a lovely, windy day, the gusts quieting the course and making it seem even more private, drowning out all the surrounding noises.

“That’s why you broke things off with her.”

Stevenson spit in disgust.

“Honestly, Robert, I didn’t know. I just thought you weren’t ready.”

They stared at the caddies up on the next tee box.

“Can I tell you something?” Stevenson said.

Hoversten waited.

“It’s not something I’m proud of. But ever since Susan and I broke it off,
ever since she told me everything, I swear to God that not a day’s gone by, not a single fucking
day
, when I haven’t—”

“Don’t say it.”

When Stevenson looked up, his eyes were bloodshot.

Hoversten couldn’t help it. All alone on a golf course and he still looked around to see if anyone was listening, as if what he’d thought had somehow been spoken aloud. It was a desire he had with this beautiful man standing before him—one he felt otherwise only with Sheppard—to please him, to
care
for him somehow. To take him in his arms and kiss his mouth.

“You know,” Mobius said, “I can list all your mistresses. From the time you were fourteen, when you started dating Marilyn, right until her death.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little perverse?”

“There was Frances Stevens, first. The summer after you gave Marilyn your fraternity pin, after your senior year of high school, after she’d gone off that fall to Skidmore, here comes chesty Frances darkening the door of your parents’ garage where you liked to fool with your Model A. You two have a date, and next thing you know you’ve offered
her
your fraternity pin, you Indian giver, since you took it back as soon as your father scolded you for your behavior, but of course that was only the beginning of a long history of not telling Marilyn about other commitments. There was Melanie, the wife of that med student you were in school with out in LA. You started up with her right after Chip was born, didn’t you? After Marilyn went through that bad postpartum, sliding into that deep pit of depression. She wouldn’t even touch you, would she? And you were a man of regular needs. You
liked
your once-a-day tumble. Then there was that little foursome with Lester and those two nurses. And right after that, Margot Wendice, a nursing instructor who that fat pimp introduced you to. You two dated for a year while Marilyn was back in Cleveland with Chip, still recovering. And Julee Lossman, just a couple months before Marilyn died—”

“Nothing happened with her.”

“No, your honor, we were just friends, the Lossmans and us. We went boating on Lake Erie one day and decided to stop at that small island near Put-in-Bay, and Julee and I decided to disappear into the woods for a while—over an hour, actually—and yes, we’d slept together several years before. Sure, her husband slapped her face after our little jaunt. But nothing happened while we were gone, your honor, I promise.”