Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [111]
“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.
“Can’t we?” she said.
He was becoming reckless.
At the hospital’s Halloween party, Sheppard decided to go dressed as a woman. He even shaved his legs, Marilyn laughing at the sight of them, at his black, discarded clippings webbing the drain. “How do you women do this every day?” he said. She did his makeup, giving him lashes long as a movie goddess, lips as red as his MG, cheeks rouged up like a drunk’s. He donned a bouffant wig and wore the most alluring dress Marilyn could find in his size. Standing with him in front of the mirror—Marilyn, as Alice in Wonderland, carried a cup labeled DRINK ME—she said, “Thank God Chip’s a boy.” When he asked why, she declared, “Because you’d make an ugly girl.” Sheppard drank two martinis to nerve himself and ordered Marilyn to drive, though she was tight herself. They entered arm in arm—the party was in Bay View’s cafeteria—and he picked Susan out immediately. Dressed as a man—like Sheppard’s father, in fact—she’d pasted a mustache above her mouth, put on the same round, black-rimmed glasses, and slicked back her hair. She came up to him, reckless too, for Marilyn was standing right there. “Got a pipe, miss?” she asked. “I do,” Sheppard said, pulling one from the waistband of his skirt and handing it to her. She put the tooth-dented stem in her mouth and made her black Groucho Marx eyebrows dance, then tapped his chest with the slicked end. “Now,” she said, “I’m Dr. Sam!” Marilyn looked at him, baffled and appalled. He shrugged, then watched Susan shoulder her way into the crowd. “I’m Dr. Sam!” she announced, and pinched Donna Bailey’s ass. He drank more. He mingled. He knew where Susan was at all times. Marilyn spoke to him; he spoke with others and pretended to listen, not hearing a thing. He spotted Susan dancing with a resident, Stevenson, and approached them. Even in baggy pants and a suit coat whose sleeves she had to roll up, he could make out the shape of her thin, boyish body.
“May I cut in?” he asked.
Stevenson was a tall man, fit and broad-shouldered, and Susan acted vaguely disappointed at Sheppard’s appearance. But he didn’t care. He’d waited long enough.
“He’s all yours, Doctor.”
She had a stethoscope around her neck now and she looked up at him, glassy-eyed. “You’re a big missy,” she said.