Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [103]
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