Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [105]
She did, at least for a while. He staunched the blood with his fist and then dressed the wound with his handkerchief, clenching the cloth with his teeth and tearing off two thin strips with his good hand. He’d come around the car and leaned against the hood, cliffside, to collect himself, and she joined him from the opposite direction, taking his throbbing thumb in her hands. She tied the bandage together over the knuckle, patted it, and said, “That was a bad idea.” They turned to face the ocean, the night moonless, the sky star-splashed through strands of fog, the crash of waves rumbling up the rock into the soles of Sheppard’s feet, the sound tracing both the height of this cliff and the vastness beyond. This, in the darkness, set him even more adrift and conferred the vaguest sense of threat—that he was somehow at risk of not surviving this night.
“It’s not so cold when we’re not moving,” Susan said, rubbing her arms with her hands.
He wondered again, Where had she gone? Where had she hidden her? The other Susan, the old Susan, was simpler, braver, and this one had made off with her. She was here just days ago, when Sheppard had arrived in Los Angeles with Marilyn. He and Susan had been corresponding since February, when she left Cleveland to move out here, after she and Dr. Stevenson had officially broken off their engagement. Sheppard had arranged this trip for intensive training and board certification in vascular and neurosurgery—a milestone, to be sure—under Chappie. But in truth it was to see Susan. “While I’m in Los Angeles,” he told Marilyn, “you could head up to Big Sur with Jo. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” They were in his bed together and Marilyn stared for a time at the ceiling. “Los Angeles,” she finally said. “Doesn’t that feel like a lifetime ago?” It had been only four years, but he said, “Yes.” The trick, of course, was to make it tempting and unappealing at the same time, to imply that he wanted her there in spite of the many restrictions: a vacation together she’d have to enjoy alone. “We could leave Chip with Richard,” he said. “I’ll be in surgery round the clock, but you’d be free to roam.” She put her arms around his waist while he sat up against his headboard. Usually she started the night in his bed, then went back to hers after he slipped off. Suddenly, she hugged him, hard, and he stared at the top of her head, imagined her scalp was a screen and he could see her brain and know what she was thinking. He kissed her, smelled her hair—a scent so familiar and unique he might as well have tried to describe the odor of blood.
She lifted her head from his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. “We could bring our racquets and play at the club again.”
“We could,” he said. “Maybe I could get away one afternoon.”
“We never play tennis anymore,” she said. “Why is that?”
“We’re busy.”
“We were busy then.”
“We will,” he said, smiling, scheming, remembering playing together back when he was a resident at Los Angeles Osteopathic, those gray clay courts at the Hollywood Tennis Club, the pleasure before they’d hit of sweeping them, smoothing away the previous match and dusting the lines to brightness, of watching Marilyn, who had real talent, whose racquet on contact made a sound he simply couldn’t generate, a ringing impact that was more report, the angle and pace she used to attack his forehand and backhand acts of supreme control that made his own strokes easier to hit, the whole rally an act of generosity that made him feel like he was dictating …
But that was long ago. Now—even as he remembered those days—his thoughts turned toward Susan, interpenetrating everything, Susan written over these scenes in invisible ink. Marilyn could come along for all he cared. He’d still manage to see Susan.
Every day of that shortest month became a countdown to March. Once things were set up with Chappie, those two weeks he’d x-ed out on his calendar became a lodestar drawing him on, beckoning him even now as he sat with his wife in bed remembering their early