Mr. Peanut (43 page)

“Frozen out? As in what?”

“As in ignored. Rendered invisible. Literally annulled. I mean, from secretaries to orderlies to the nurses themselves. He’d groped so many of them, said so many lewd things, that after several senior women complained to the administration and were rebuffed, one day they just stopped working with him. One of the chief surgeons told me it was the damnedest thing he’d ever seen. He figured they must’ve had a meeting the night before, because the next day literally every woman on the staff agreed to pretend Hoversten didn’t exist. It was
that
coordinated. He walks in the hospital, asks for his surgery schedule, and the secretary walks away from her desk like he’s a ghost she can’t see. Hoversten figures she’s either crazy or playing a joke, so he gets his rotation himself and scrubs in but can’t get a single nurse to help him with his gloves or gown. When he calls out, it’s like they’re all deaf. They won’t even glance in his direction. He walks into the theater for a routine tonsillectomy and nobody’s there but him and the patient. Of course, the chief of staff is furious once he gets wind of what’s going on—and that’s within minutes, because Hoversten’s standing in surgery screaming his lungs out. So he pulls the head nurse aside and
orders her back to work, at which point she lays down her ultimatum: It’s us or him. Either Hoversten goes or the whole hospital shuts down. So the chief, who’s had to put up with his goosing nurses and ogling patients for months, sits him down in his office, explains the situation, and tells him to pack his things.”

Marilyn covered her mouth.

Nancy clapped her hands and laughed. “Who says there’s no justice?”

They all went quiet as soon as Sheppard entered.

“At ease,” he said. “I’m not mad. Quite honestly, it’s news to me.” He turned to Marilyn. “Where
is
Les, by the way?”

“He went golfing,” Marilyn said. “In Kent.”

“Who with?”

She hesitated. “Dr. Stevenson.”

Nancy looked at her.

Don, a little late, rubbed his hands together and said,
“Yum,”
then began to serve himself.

“Is he going to join us?” Sheppard said.

“I think he’s gone for the rest of the weekend,” Marilyn said.

He couldn’t stand the silence but was too tired to be frustrated—at Hoversten’s negligence or everyone’s discomfort. “So,” he said, “more pie for me then.”

That too was before, he thought. And
before
was as much the people you surrounded yourself with as a state of mind. Perhaps Don was more right than he knew, and Hoversten was a liability not just for the hospital but also Sheppard’s own new life. Why honor the years they’d known each other, given everything that had happened? Why keep him near? Like everything else he wanted
out
of his life, why not just let the man pass—though at the mention of Dr. Stevenson, he couldn’t help but recall an episode they’d had several months before Stevenson had broken off his engagement to Susan Hayes. They were scrubbing in, alone together, Sheppard making small talk about the Indians game the night before, aware with each word of his little secret, the memory of sex with Susan that very morning fresh on his mind.

“Dr. Sheppard,” Stevenson interrupted, “may I say something?”

“Of course.”

“While I’m working under you, you can count on me to give you my complete dedication as a resident. I’ll follow any orders or procedures you ask of me to the letter. I’ll learn
everything
you have to teach me. But beyond that,” he said, now facing him directly, “I don’t want to hear a goddamn word out of your mouth.”

Sheppard turned to look at him, taking in his furious expression, his raised finger between them, then glanced away because he was smiling. He couldn’t help it. He was on the verge of laughter. Something about the man’s melodrama seemed so rehearsed, his righteous anger having no more impact than a whiffed punch. He felt oddly embarrassed for the both of them. Above the sink, in the reflection in the window looking into the surgical theater, he saw Stevenson turn away from him and scrub brutally at his hands, and then he saw his own smiling reflection, but his smile reminded him of a drunk’s, with an enormous gap between his expression and what was in his brain. A drunk would smile as easily at an insult as a word of praise. Was that what suddenly disgusted him so much? (His revulsion was suddenly so sharp he wanted to run out of the room.) Was it that he had no response to Stevenson’s demand except to smile? Or that his first reaction to something so serious, which involved other people’s hearts, was the most damning? You care about nothing, he had thought.

Even now, sitting on the patio, the memory made him wince.

The kids came out during dessert, only seconds before the first fireworks started, as if they each had their own built-in clock set to announce the celebration. Chip sat on his mother’s lap but Sheppard signaled him over, took him between his knees, and explained how the explosives worked and how the lovely shapes were formed. The shell on top of each rocket was stuffed with black powder and explosive stars, each one a light you see in the sky, the bursting charge down the middle timed to go off after the rocket reached a certain altitude, thus igniting the powder and throwing the stars away from it with uniform force and in prearranged patterns—flowers or concentric circles—and those bursting half a second later in brilliant color. “Those are chain reactions you’re seeing.” And whether or not Chip understood, he looked on attentively and, when the show reached its crescendo, the explosions rattling the silverware on the table, he clutched Sheppard’s legs, his little fists bunching the corduroy.

“I always get depressed when it ends,” Nancy said.

Don gathered up their kids to take them next door and put them to bed while Nancy and Marilyn cleared the dishes. Before leaving, he turned on the radio; the Indians were up by one in the middle of the seventh. Sheppard stayed seated on the patio, watching the crowds peter out below, smelling the smoke and powder that wafted off the water. Did battlefields smell like this at nightfall?

He slept.

When he woke, Chip was tugging at his arm. He looked at his watch. It was half past ten.

The boy was in his pajamas, with a balsa-wood airplane, a glider, in his hands. “Dad, will you please help me fix this?”

Sheppard looked at it. The wing was broken on the left side, split but not shorn away. The boy almost never came to him for help. “It’s past your bedtime,” he said, rubbing his hair, “but since you asked like an adult, yes. Let’s go see what we can do.”

By now Marilyn and Nancy were seated in front of the television, talking lazily, Nancy lying on the couch. Don sat by the radio, the top of his head pressed against the wall and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, staring so intently while he listened it was as if there was a screen there.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nancy said.

“No,” Marilyn said. “There’s an ashtray on the patio.”

She got up. As Sheppard passed by Marilyn’s chair she reached out to him, taking his forearm in her fingers and gliding her nails down his wrist and across his palm.

“We’re going to fix his airplane,” Sheppard said.

“Before you do that,” she said, “will you lock the patio door?” But Nancy was already locking it, the ashtray in her other hand.

In the basement, Sheppard turned on the light, led the boy over to his workshop, got his Elmer’s glue, and explained to Chip how to spread it lightly across the bottom of the wing, struggling to keep his patience as the boy squirted the white liquid onto the tabletop. “You have to squeeze it carefully,” Sheppard said. He found a bunch of clothespins in a bucket by his tools and handed him two of them. “Now,” he said, “how can you clip these on so the wing holds its original shape?” He watched, so exhausted he thought he might fall asleep right here, as the boy pinched the wing between the clothespins and looked to him for confirmation, thinking again that something was wrong with him. There was a fissure in his character that made him manifestly uncertain of everything. When he fixed the clothespins on each side of the wing, pinching it back into shape, Sheppard was sure that the plane was permanently crippled.

“Do you think it will fly again?”

“We’ll see,” Sheppard said, turning the plane upside down with the broken wing atop a tin can, the weight of the body helping to restore its aerodynamic line.

Chip’s shrug was a perfect imitation of his mother. “At least we tried,” he said.

Upstairs, Sheppard handed him off to Marilyn, who took him to his room, and then he sat down in her chair and crossed his arms.

“Are you cold?” Nancy asked.

“A little,” he said. On the television screen, a man in a suit was standing next to the Planters Peanuts character, talking to the mascot as if he weren’t dressed in an absurd costume, his only replies coming in hand signals and dance moves. “What are we watching?” Sheppard said.

“A brief word from our sponsor,” Nancy said.

“Is there anything else?”

“There’s a movie coming on in a second.”

Feeling Nancy’s eyes on the back of his head, he turned around and saw her lying on their sofa smoking a cigarette, the top two buttons of her blouse undone.

“I’m sorry about the boy,” she said.

“I am too,” he said.

“Do you dream about it—about things that happen to you during the day?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

He’d always found Nancy attractive. She seemed to realize this, acted like she felt the same way about him, and always spoke very intimately whenever they were alone. This, however, made their conversations weirdly stilted.

She nodded at him weightily, utterly stumped.

There was a time when he’d looked for sex everywhere, trying to sniff out discontent or interest in every woman he met, as if every interaction was like a door to a new opportunity, another possible reality, every conversation not about the thing itself but something else. Now everything had shifted back.

Marilyn came downstairs. “I think he’s going to sleep,” she whispered, then sat in his lap and buried her face in his neck, putting her lips to his ear. “He’s going to sleep,” she said, and the words themselves made him shiver in pleasure.

Behind them, Don clapped once and winced in guilt at the noise he’d made. “Sorry,” he said. “The Indians won,” and then he looked at Sheppard and Marilyn and then at his wife, who said, “I need some affection too.”

He cleared his throat and moved over to the sofa, where she laid her head across his lap. “How’s that?” he said, and patted her shoulder.

Nancy looked at Marilyn and shook her head.

“Well, it’s something,” she said.

The movie was called
Strange Holiday
and from what Sheppard could gather—with Marilyn nuzzling his cheek and neck—it was about a man who goes off on a fishing trip in the deep woods and returns to find the
country taken over by fascists. He could’ve poked a hundred holes in the premise but instead he pressed his face into Marilyn’s hair.

“Do you know what I was thinking about?” she whispered.

“Tell me.”

She slid her hand down between her legs and his and squeezed. “I was thinking about Sandusky.”

“That was nice,” he said.

“Sandusky was
very
nice,” she said.

He thought for a moment of the cottage they’d rented there just two weekends ago, having sex morning and night. Marilyn was rubbing him now as surreptitiously as possible and he wanted to laugh, feeling as aroused as he’d been earlier when watching her take that drink from Nancy between their houses. He’d driven in an amateur car race that weekend, his penis sore between his legs, thrumming with every lap, and every time he roared by the grandstand he’d been able to pick Marilyn out among the hundreds of people, as if hers was the only face not in motion, her features strangely distinct.

“Are you sleeping?” she said.

“Let me get up,” he said.

“Stay.”

“I’ll be back.” Then he got up and went to the daybed and lay down.

He slept.

He sat up. Everyone was watching the movie, and Marilyn turned to him as if somehow signaled by his waking. She waved him over as he rubbed his eyes. “Come watch,” she said.

He looked at the screen: a man seated behind bars was repeating the same phrase over and over.

“Come on, Sam,” she said. She tilted her head and smiled. “It’s going to improve.”

He chuckled at the allusion and then lay down again and looked at her, his arms crossed over his chest like in a Mexican standoff, and he smiled back. She shrugged and turned around. He stared at the back of her head for a moment, at her hair through the bars of the rocker, at her blouse with its little wing designs, at the athletic curve of her legs, one crossed over the other, at the moccasins on her feet. She’d let one half slip off and was tapping it against her heel.

It is possible, he thought, to be completely happy in marriage—though you must be willing to hold on when your ship was lost at sea and there was no guarantee of rescue. They had both held on, at times by means unbeknownst
to the other that might not look to an outsider like holding on at all. It is possible to be completely happy. And just as surely that happiness could pass. It was a fact. As it was that when the new came, it seemed like it would last forever, endure as a permanent blessing, carrying with it the promise that it could be tended, like a flame. Tend this, he thought. Let it last.

Pleased, he slipped off to sleep.

Marilyn woke.

She was still in the rocking chair when Don gently shook her shoulder and she looked up at him, startled. Except for the kitchen, nearly all the lights were out in the house, and Marilyn could hear Nancy putting up the last of the plates. “Don’t do any more,” she said, standing up and squinting in the brightness.

“I’m done,” Nancy said, and smiled, folding up the dish towel.

“What time is it?”

“Twelve thirty,” Don whispered.

They walked quietly through the kitchen and said good-bye and Marilyn was about to close the door but stopped for a moment to listen to the wind whipping the trees, then turned out the light, locked the door, and through the window watched the Aherns walking across the lawn under the trees, Nancy’s arms crossed.