Mr. Peanut (32 page)

“I can’t drive you home this evening,” he said, cutting the ignition. They were in the hospital parking lot. “I’m on call.”

“That’s lucky,” she said. “I am too.”

It was a Wednesday. Twice a month, Sheppard did a twenty-four-hour rotation with a seven-to-seven shift. The weekends tended to be busy, a euphemism for bad, particularly now that spring was in full force, early June now, more boaters out on the lake, more accidents, mostly boys doing stupid things. They’d lost a sixteen-year-old last month who’d slipped off the back of an outboard. Unaware of this, his older brother gunned the motor and shredded his hands, arms, and right leg, severing six fingers as well as the superior mesenteric and internal iliac arteries, the blade dicing the cephalic and basilic veins. He’d lost nearly nine pints of blood by the time they got him on the table; and standing over this mess, the boy’s skin milk white from shock, Sheppard froze. The right side looked like it had been mauled by a mythical creature, the blooming gashes revealing veins, tendons, and muscles so grossly mashed that he concluded both limbs would have to be amputated in order to give the kid any chance of survival. But he died within minutes. Afterward, his brother’s face was contorted with calamity and his parents agape, absorbing the news with something near awe, their grief so palpable and strong and localized, their arms over each other in a scrum of protection and anguish, it was like the force field between opposing magnets, thin and utterly impenetrable. And it was with such sudden accidents, when death didn’t just appear out of nowhere so much as erupt, that Sheppard allowed himself to give thanks for his own safety, for a life free of suffering. For his own brilliant luck.

This night, however, had been so very quiet that Sheppard actually
longed for disaster. He was bored. He did rounds he easily could have left to the nurses. He took a detour by pathology, walked as inconspicuously as he could past the door, and through the frosted glass he made out Susan’s gray form—like an outline shaded with the flat side of a pencil—just inside the room. He could hear her heels striking the floor, and when they turned toward the door, he hurried off down the hall, went back to his office, and took a nap.

Later, close to five, a man in his midthirties was brought in by the police. He was well dressed, wearing a suit. But he was also disheveled: shirt untucked, tie loose, coat wrinkled, pants muddy at the cuffs, the shoes splattered and flecked with grass. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his face and his eyes were glassy, the rims red, but Sheppard smelled no alcohol. “We found him walking down Lake Road,” the cop said. “He can’t speak coherently.” When Sheppard asked the man his name, he looked up, baffled, as if he’d heard only a distant echo. “Put it in
there,”
he said. “Please.” He held up both palms, then coughed violently, hunching over. A gob of green sputum hit the floor between his feet. Sheppard had the nurse bring him a container and scooped it up with a tongue depressor, then laid the patient on the bed. Happily, the man closed his eyes. Sheppard listened to his lungs, which sounded like a water whistle. The spleen was enlarged, the abdomen hot. When Sheppard touched it, the man winced alert. “How many times do I have to
say
it?” he said, looking around as if he’d just landed on Mars. His blood pressure was low and falling. Sheppard thought for a moment, then ordered IV fluids and drew blood, a procedure the patient regarded bemusedly before dozing off again.

“Have Miss Hayes do a CBC, please, and a urinalysis,” he told the nurse. “Tell her to bring me the results as soon as she gets them.” Then he went to speak with the police. The man had no wallet, no ID at all, though he was wearing a wedding band. Neither of the officers recognized him.

“Is he on drugs?” one said.

“I don’t think so,” Sheppard said.

“Is he sick?”

“Very.”

Sheppard returned to the room and waited with the patient, whose blood pressure continued to fall. He checked his watch; it had been almost twenty minutes. When Susan entered, he managed to remain calm.

“Is this him?” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked at the patient for a second, then handed Sheppard her chart. For a moment, each had a hand on the clipboard.

“His white count’s markedly elevated,” she said.

“How much?”

“Twenty-two thousand.”

“What’s his hematocrit?”

“Thirty-five,” she said.

The figures were right there on the page, but he wanted to ask. “What about the peripheral smear?”

“I noted vacuoles in some of the white cells.”

Sheppard took in her scent.

“He’s clearly septic,” she said.

“Do you have results on the sputum?”

“He’s gram positive.”

“Single population?”

“Yes.”

“What do they look like?”

“Lancet-shaped.”

“Go on.”

“I’d say diplococci. But you can review the slide if you’d like.”

He let go of the clipboard. She put her hand on her hip and pressed the page to her breast, looking at him as if he were about to correct her.

“Very good,” he said.

She smiled.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“I noticed inclusion in the red cells.”

Sheppard smiled too. It was the longest conversation they’d ever had. He took a step closer and they stood together at the foot of the patient’s bed. He laid there, a young man in a suit, a John Doe, blood pressure falling to fatal levels. His breathing was labored, whistling slightly.

“What would your diagnosis be?” Sheppard asked.

“I’m not a doctor.”

“But if you were.”

Her faced flushed. He wanted to take it in his hands and kiss her.

“I’d say pneumococcal pneumonia. That would account for the low oxygen levels in his blood. And the disorientation.”

“Anything else?”

“Peritonitis. Also septicemia.”

“How would you treat it?”

“IV penicillin, immediately. And fluids, of course.”

Sheppard took the clipboard off the man’s bed and made a note. “Then that, Miss Hayes, is what we’ll do.”

She waited for a moment, looking at the man and then back at Sheppard.

“That’ll be all,” he said, and watched her leave.

His brother Stephen arrived early, around a quarter till six. By then Sheppard’s patient had stabilized. He brought Stephen up to speed and went back to his office; exhausted, he took off his doctor’s coat and put on his suit jacket, then decided to peek his head in pathology before leaving.

But Susan was gone. Tricia was already mulling over some slides in her place.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, Doctor.”

He tapped the door once, looking around the lab, and left.

She was waiting for him in his car.

It was surprisingly humid outside, overcast, and it made the whole world bluer, all sound seemingly muffled by the promise of rain, with occasional birdcalls and the peculiar, particular brand of quiet you noticed only at odd hours or during dreams. Sheppard got in and started the car. “Are you hungry?” he asked, though he couldn’t look at her. “Yes,” she said, sounding as anxious as he felt. It was as if they were running from something. The need for food gave him license, and he pulled out; instead of heading toward Rocky River he went west through Bay Village toward Avon, though in truth he had no idea where he was going. It made him nearly desperate, this wandering. They had to
get
somewhere. It was as if he were in an unknown city, in a dreadful neighborhood, low on gas and lost. Before the township, he saw a brown sign with
THORNTON PARK
in gold letters above icons for a picnic table, a camper, a boat. He made such a hard right the MG fishtailed slightly, spraying the bushes with gravel. As he weaved down the narrow, winding two-lane road, Susan pressed her hand lightly on the dash. They came around one more curve and there it was: Erie in all its vastness, gray water against gray sky. A landing. A slack tide. Not a boat to be seen. The water looked forbidding, poisoned in its stillness. The wooded parking area with picnic tables was empty. Sheppard pulled in, cut the ignition. There was no sound except the quietest lapping, just beyond the bushes blocking a view of the beach, of the small waves. He faced forward for a long time and saw nothing.

She touched his leg.

He was upon her. If he could, he would feast on her mouth; he couldn’t press his to hers any harder. He tore his arm from his coat and took the back of her head in his available hand lest she try even for a moment to break away, then slipped his other arm out of the sleeve. She pressed his shoulders back. His lips were trembling and his teeth began to chatter. She
was as still and calm as the lake. “The seats,” she said. He reached beneath her, between her legs, pulled at the latch and pushed her seat, hard, as far from the dash as it would go. He reached across her waist, his cheek pressed against her blouse, and lifted the latch by her door so that the bucket seat fell to near horizontal—then he was on her again. And just the feeling of her legs in each of his hands as he kissed her—the slightly moist crook of her knees and the soft, leather-warmed underside of her thighs—might be enough to satisfy him, or the pain of her heels hooked into his calves as she lay beneath him, or simply the sight of her as she crawled up the seat on her elbows so he could slide her panties off the leg he pressed bent to her chest and then down over the knee of the other to dangle at the ankle. Or how she slowed him down, unbuckling his trousers, lifting him up at the hips so she should could push his pants to the floorboard with the sharp toe of her shoe, stretching the boxers away from his cock, so it arched taut and free in the warm morning air. He raised himself up toward her chest, Susan taking hold of him—“Lie back,” she said—and never letting go while he slid beneath her, guiding him in while she eased herself down slowly, gently, the containment and spatial restrictions of the car itself, that it wouldn’t give either of them full freedom of movement, augmenting the bliss. “God
damn
it,” she said, pressing the heel of her hand to the headrest for balance and gripping the door handle with the other, both of them finally finding the right purchase, Sheppard shifting until he was nearly diagonal, his leg thrown over the stick and his foot smashed against the brake. “Are you ready?” she whispered. He closed his eyes. She moved so fast he was afraid to look, this physical incantation as she thrummed a brand of magic above him, something that might transform him into a pillar of salt if he dared open his eyes, a spell whose effect was to suck away something feathery that he hadn’t realized was lining his whole body. When she stopped, he lay there blind. His stomach, for a time, contracted uncontrollably and his extremities tingled so violently he had to tense up to keep from convulsing. And then he felt it: the warm wash spreading over his lap, an issuance that made him instantly erect and almost immediately ejaculate again. He lay still, groaning, and opened his eyes to see her watching him. Her hair was pasted against her forehead, her neck and chest shining. Her large nipples had burst from her white brassiere. She laughed now, wickedly, leaning forward and gathering his collar into her fists while he regrew inside her yet again.

“Did you
feel
that?” she said.

He blinked away his sweat.

“Who are you?” he wanted to ask.

•    •    •

Where was
that
Susan? he wondered now, staring at nothing over the cliff. And did she wonder herself? For it was a car just like this, Sheppard thought.

Once again and in spite of everything, he came around to the passenger side and opened the door for her, though this time she didn’t thank him. He took his seat and started the engine, his thumb throbbing, then pulled out onto the road. He shouldn’t be surprised that things between them had changed; like health, no state of being endured. Yet they’d reached what seemed to Sheppard a perfect arrangement: they were the exact answer to each other’s needs. Marilyn had cut him off, after all, or at least urged him to leave her alone. He was free, she said, just so long as she didn’t know. And so through all of that spring and into the summer of 1951, he and Susan had fucked in that car until they arrived at something they both believed approximated lovemaking, that felt necessary. But it was different, he realized: utterly new, something
more
. Even through the fall they maintained a pure pragmatism to their relationship, an unspoken agreement to make plans at some point in their shift to meet (between visits to patients, say, or in stops at the lab), after which it was a longing for the day to end. She’d be waiting in his car, he’d drive, and then they’d find deserted parking lots at stores closed for the night, alleyways whose blind walls rose from lanes pocked and puddled, the locked-down loading docks bumpered with black rubber, the fences topped with barbed wire, places where buildings hid air conditioners, dumpsters, and downspouts from sight, service entrances marked
RING BELL
or
DELIVERIES ONLY.
And during very late nights, either on call or after emergency surgeries, they parked in the backs of grocery stores buttressed by towering stacks of emptied wooden crates that put him in mind of lobster traps, or in the scores of parks along Erie’s shore, paved roads dissolved to gravel and sand, Sheppard cutting the lights after screeching to a halt.

“Can’t we ever make love in a real bed?” Susan asked finally.

Sheppard found the request disappointing. After months he’d still never seen her completely naked and secretly didn’t want to. Half-exposed, she was more beautiful; like the armless Venus de Milo or the headless Winged Victory of Samothrace, it was what was missing that conferred on her a kind of perfection. It was how she looked when she did what she
did
, and Sheppard would look up from the floor while talking with another doctor—hearing the sound of her heels in the hallway—to see her ankles,
her thin calves, her skirt brushing her knees. He’d call her into his office, order her to come around his desk. He’d run a hand up her thigh, beneath her skirt and between her legs. She’d let him squeeze her hard, the heat rising off her, her eyes starting to close like a doll tipped to sleep. But then she resisted.