Mr. Peanut (34 page)

His father was going to tell him whether he cared or not.

“I think sins are what you ignore,” he said.

Sheppard, still shocked at himself, couldn’t speak.

“Because we know what we do.” His father removed his glasses, cleaning them on the hem of his doctor’s coat. “Everything we do is a response to that—to knowing.” He held the lenses to the light, then replaced them. “Now make a decision.”

“About what?”

“Are you staying or not?”

“I would never leave,” Sheppard said, amazed by this unalterable truth.

“Good,” his father said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to get this done before I go home.”

In March, Susan quietly left Bay View for her new job; by May, she and Dr. Stevenson had moved to Minnesota for his residency. Sheppard neither saw nor spoke to her before she left. It was as if there was no need, though out of habit, he’d glance into pathology when he walked by. The world without her wasn’t lacking in feeling or satisfaction, merely expectation. At dinner one night, out of nowhere, Marilyn said, “I heard Susan Hayes and Robert Stevenson got engaged.” He held his knife and fork crossed over the meatloaf, gazing at the food on his plate. There’d been a great deal of conversation at the table that night, but these were the first words he’d heard. “That’s wonderful,” he said, then cut.

May and June were infernally busy; it was amazing how quickly time passed once summer had arrived. Only the shape of Chip’s body seemed to capture it. When did his face become that of a little man? Sheppard couldn’t recall ever spending more than an hour with him. He’d find Chip coloring on the patio, lean down, press a palm to his cheek, and kiss him, but the boy would push him away and call for his mother. Or he’d simply say, “No,” and collect his book and crayons and leave—a rebuke that left his father stunned and blinking. There were evenings at work when he wanted to rush home and gather Chip in his arms, but he didn’t. And though Sheppard still came home for lunch, he often ate alone in the kitchen. He could
hear Marilyn’s bath draining upstairs, hear her pad across the hallway, but for some reason he was afraid to see her. One late-August morning, when he came home early and Marilyn had just finished bathing, he led her to their bedroom, stirred by the idea of lovemaking. He took off his clothes and lay down next to her. “My diaphragm isn’t in,” she said. He went to the medicine cabinet and retrieved it. Their room was warm and filled with light; the wind made waves on the lake that they could hear lapping on the beach. Sitting on the bed, he slathered the rubber cup with the spermicidal meringue. She lay beneath him with her robe peeled open; and after Sheppard slid the diaphragm in and up against the knob of her cervix, he looked at her bared body, at the small dollop of paste stuck to her black hairs (which Marilyn, noticing too, pinched away), and realized something he could no longer hide from himself, that made him look out the window in hopes she wouldn’t see it on his face: he felt no desire for her. Sitting here beside her, it was like his cock was dead. And if this was only a season in their marriage that, like this summer, itself would pass, would his loneliness be so overwhelming? Yet if his father was right and we
knew
, then why couldn’t he be sure that this was in fact their end, that whatever had been between them was now permanently extinguished? “It’s all right,” she said, and stroked his arm. “We don’t have to today.” He lay there next to her and listened to the leaves ticking against the screens and, while she cried, took her head in his hand and pressed her temple to his, holding her like a brother might a sister.

“But Susan came back that summer, didn’t she?” Mobius said.

“Yes,” Sheppard answered.

“Alone?”

“With her fiancé. With Dr. Stevenson.”

“Did you resume your affair?”

“Yes.”

“Just picked up where you left off?”

“Not exactly.”

“How was it different?”

“We didn’t see each other as much.”

“Why not?”

“She didn’t have as much freedom. And she was more hesitant perhaps.”

“Why?”

“This time she had something to lose.”

“Didn’t you both have something to lose?”

“It’s difficult to say.”

“Because Marilyn was so tolerant.”

“Resigned, more like it.”

“Because of your ‘agreement.’”

“She knew she couldn’t meet certain needs of mine, yes.”

“But she never suggested you get a divorce?”

Sheppard shrugged. “Not seriously.”

“Did Susan?”

Sheppard didn’t answer.

“Did she?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever tell her that you’d contemplated it?”

“Yes. But I also told her about my father. About the attention it would bring the family.”

“And what was her reaction to that?”

“She told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.”

“So she ended things between you?”

“She tried.”

“What do you mean?”

“We might go several weeks without speaking, but after a time I’d call and we’d meet again.”

“It sounds to me like you were in love.”

“You’re entitled to your opinion.”

“Doc—”

“Detective.”

“Listen to yourself.”

Sheppard refilled and lit his pipe.

“So much of what you say flies in the face of common sense.”

“With regard to what?”

“Your marriage.”

Sheppard blew smoke toward the cell.

“What’s sensible about any marriage?”

“People can’t share each other like that.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you.”

“People can’t endure that kind of unhappiness.”

“There I think you’re wrong.”

“Really? Look at Susan. She broke things off with her fiancé.”

“He
broke it off.”

“But isn’t that just incidental?”

“I don’t see what you mean.”

“Isn’t that too convenient an explanation?”

“I don’t agree with what you’re implying.”

“Come on now, Doctor.”

“Detective.”

“State the
facts
. Susan Hayes returns to Cleveland from Minnesota and you immediately resume your affair. A year later, she and her fiancé break off their engagement. True?”

“Yes.”

“That February, four months before Marilyn’s murder, Susan moves to California, a place you’d always considered living yourself. Tell me, did you see Susan before she left that time?”

“Yes.”

“Give her a nice send off? Good-bye and good luck?”

“I did.”

“And you made plans, didn’t you? To see each other again.”

“The following month, yes.”

“When you arranged to do surgery training in Los Angeles. But you could’ve done that anywhere, no?”

“Perhaps.”

“Did you give her any gifts before she left?”

“I gave her a suede jacket—”

“Something to keep her warm.”

“—and a signet ring.”

“And something that promised a future.”

“Everything you’re implying is wrong.”

“You get to California and send your wife three hundred miles north to Big Sur with Jo Chapman the minute you land. You go see Susan immediately, true?”

“Yes.”

“And that night you bring her to stay with you at the home of your good friend, Dr. Miller, to a party he’s having, no less, with people who know Marilyn.”

“If I was planning to kill my wife, why do something so flagrant?”

“I didn’t say you were planning to kill her
then
. I’m saying you didn’t care anymore. I’m saying you did it
because
it was so flagrant. You wanted Marilyn to find out because then her only option would be to demand a divorce.”

“Wrong again.”

“If she demanded a divorce, what could your father say?”

“It never entered my mind.”

“Where’s the Übermensch in you? Where’s the spine? You never could stand up to the old man, could you?”

Sheppard chuckled.

“Two days later you and Susan move into a hotel in LA. You train during the day and spend your nights with her. As if
you two
were the ones on the vacation together. As if
you two
were married.”

“No matter how it looks from the outside, you’re still wrong.”

“And that weekend you even take her with you to a wedding. A little dress rehearsal for the future?”

“Susan and I ended things after that. On the drive home.”

“Just like that?”

“No. Something happened.”

“What?”

“Something terrible.”

“Tell me, Dr. Sam. If it was over between you, why didn’t you tell the detectives about Susan after Marilyn was murdered? Just days after she was killed, you were asked directly if you’d had an affair with Susan Hayes,
and you lied
. You said you were just friends. You lied then and again at your inquest. If things were over, why bother lying?”

“I lied because it had no relevance. Because it was over.”

“Then why did
she
lie? When the Los Angeles DA questioned her, she said you two had never had an affair.”

“I had no control over what she said.”

“She had everything to lose by lying. But we know why she lied, don’t we?”

Sheppard took off his watch and wound it.

“She was thinking about the future, wasn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“She was your motive. You agreed to break things off in Los Angeles so it wouldn’t
look
like it was planned.”

“Things ended between us. On that drive.”

Mobius shook his head.

“An affair like that takes commitment, Doctor. It doesn’t just end one night.”

“I’m not talking about commitment,” Sheppard said. “I’m talking about love.”

That summer, just days after Susan returned to Cleveland, to Bay Village, Dr. Stevenson’s ring on her finger, just minutes after she and Sam met at
a motel in Avon, just moments after they had sex, Sheppard burst out, “I love you.”

And he knew this was untrue, an utterance that was merely a veil over love’s absence; like sonar, it was a shouting out to receive an echo back. But saying it and then cursing himself for the loss of control, he partially realized why.

For over a year, he and Marilyn had been almost completely chaste, a year interrupted by nights of drunkenness, late evenings with the Aherns or the Houks, with his brothers’ families, Sheppard counting Marilyn’s drinks and watching them empty like sand in an hourglass until she took his arm and notified him that the room was spinning. “Take me home,” she said. He excused them, helped her into the car, helped her out when they arrived at their house, watched her stand smiling at the sitter, deaf and dumb, red-eyed and heavy-lidded during the report on Chip, Sheppard paying the girl and seeing her out while Marilyn staggered upstairs, biding his time by the refrigerator drinking water with Alka-Seltzer and then standing over her bed while he removed his clothes and pulled hers off as he would a child’s while she mumbled a sometimes happy, sometimes angry protest. And finally he fell upon her, kissing her with passion, putting her hand on his cock to which she ministered semiconsciously and burying his face between her legs to taste something of Susan, struggling to conjure her when Marilyn, in a burst of wakefulness, sat on his hips and pumped away, Sheppard pinching his imagination to its limits of vividness until for a second Susan
was
there. And then he lifted Marilyn’s hips and moved her whole lower body off his when he came, because the diaphragm wasn’t in. He threw the covers over her afterward and crawled into his own bed, so shocked at himself that for the longest time he couldn’t sleep.

“Oh, Sam,” Susan had said, “I love you too.”

Yet they saw each other far less than before. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes they might not even speak for three. It was partially logistics; Susan lived with Robert now. And it was something else. She’d changed. In her year away, she’d gained weight—fifteen pounds, maybe. It was becoming on her. He could no longer see her ribs; her hips had widened slightly. “The food up there,” she said, “it’s all meat and cheese.” She’d also taken up smoking: Chesterfields, like Marilyn, but Sheppard didn’t enjoy watching her as he did his wife. Susan inhaled and exhaled almost immediately, without relish in the act and probably how she’d seen a movie star do it, whereas it remained the most sensual thing Marilyn did—at least when he managed to catch her at it.

“What is it?” Susan asked him. They were lying in a motel bed. (It was
September already.) She was under the covers, the ashtray resting on her belly. Sheppard watched as she stubbed out the remaining half of her cigarette.

“Nothing,” he said.

She put the ashtray on the bedside table, then flung off the covers. When she put on her panties and bra, she did it with her back to him. “I think we have to stop this now,” she said. She found her skirt, snapped it like a sheet twice, then stepped into it.

“All right.”

“I want you to stop calling me,” she said. “I want you to promise.” And when he didn’t speak, she whirled on him. “I said I want you to promise.”

“I promise,” Sheppard said.

He called her a week later. It gave him an odd sense of delight, her silence on the phone when she answered, the ease with which she broke down. “I’ll be at the Perkins motel in an hour,” he said. “If you’re not there, I understand.” He waited in the room, not even bothering to turn on the lights or the radio, lying on the bed with his suit still on, his hands clasped behind his head, making bets as to how long it would take her to arrive. When she knocked softly, he let her in and sat down as she stood beside the bed. Then he pulled her down next to him. She let him kiss her resignedly at first—her cheek, the edges of her lips, her mouth—and soon they returned to the place they always found …

Of course, Sheppard thought, she had more to lose this time.

She stood by the mirror, replacing her earrings. When she was done, she rested her fingers on the bureau and looked at him in the reflection. “Sam,” she said. “I want you to do a favor for me.”

He couldn’t help but cross his arms and smile.

“A big, big favor.”

“Name it.”

“I want you to leave, right now.” She was near tears. “Stay far away from me and don’t come near me again.” She wiped her eyes with her middle fingers: one, two. “There isn’t going to be anything more between us. So please, good-bye … good luck. No conversation. Just leave.”