Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [112]
Sheppard was so hard he thanked God for the pantyhose.
“What’re you here for?” she said. “Rectal? Hernia exam?”
She went to reach beneath his skirt but he restrained her, catching sight of Marilyn watching them, shocked.
“Ah,” she said, “I know. It’s your heart.” She pressed the scope to his chest, slipping the cold disk onto his skin. “Hmmm,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be beating.” She leaned up to his ear. “I think all the blood’s in your dick.”
He pressed into her and they danced for three songs, and when he looked up Marilyn was gone.
Later, all the lights were off in the apartment. Sheppard had to hold the banister and press against the wall with his other palm to make it up the stairs. He took a piss and saw his harridan’s face weaving in the mirror. Knocking his earrings off the edge of the sink, he stumbled out and found Marilyn in the guest room. She’d wrapped herself in so many blankets they looked like a cocoon.
“You did it,” she said. “You actually did it.”
“Did what?”
“You’re fucking that woman.”
He laughed: just the thought of it. “I wouldn’t say I’m fucking her.”
“You decided to take me up on my offer.”
“The one to stop fucking you? Or the one to fuck?”
“And I really thought you wouldn’t,” she said.
“Well, what’s a girl to do?” he said, then swayed off to their room.
When he woke in the morning, she was staring at him from her bed. His hangover was like a pall.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I just don’t want to see it.”
Sheppard looked at himself. Still dressed as a woman, he had to get himself under control.
“Promise me,” she said.
But he wasn’t up to it.
Late that fall, he and Marilyn bought a home on Lake Road that had three bedrooms upstairs, a boat landing, and a screened-in porch with a spectacular view. Massive saucer-shaped clouds gathered low over the lake, layered in varying depths of gray, all pregnant with snow. Every body of water, Sheppard thought, was a mystery, as unique each day in appearance as a letter of the Mayan alphabet. Their move had made Marilyn happy. She’d been in a flurry of homemaking; his only responsibilities, she told him, were the boathouse and his study. Something had eased in her; she’d become more compliant. One night, as they talked in their separate beds, he could discern the black outline of her form as she told him she wanted to try. And so, in the afternoons, after warning her, “I’m coming home for lunch,” he’d eye the sandwich and glass of milk she’d laid out in the kitchen and hurry upstairs to their bedroom. Marilyn had ordered him to buy two twins, so he wouldn’t disturb her on nights when he was called into the hospital, and she lay waiting now in hers, her body still bath-warmed, clean and odorless, her white robe peeled open like the petals of a flower. She stared out the window while he undressed, draping his coat, pants, and shirt over the chair by her bed. When he climbed atop her, she tensed and said, “You’re freezing.” They kissed. Her mouth, her soft lips and their fit to his, was as familiar as the oddly metallic taste of her nipples, Sheppard so well-versed in the sequence of their lovemaking it was like walking through their living room in the dark. She kept her eyes closed, her expression, as he entered her, always of pain. Only at the very end did he feel anxious, did it seem, her face filling his sight, that she might say something disappointing. But they didn’t speak in those brief moments after. She kissed his cheek and gripped his neck in her arms. “That was nice,” she finally whispered. He went to the bathroom and rinsed himself off in the sink, proud of his postcoital size, then dressed, ate his sandwich, and drank his milk. Driving back to work, it was as if he’d left an alternative reality, Chip and Marilyn and their lives together something he’d dreamed.
He couldn’t help but compare those afternoons to his times with Susan. Honoring her request, he fucked her now in a real bed, in the interns’ apartment the hospital had rented, four modestly furnished rooms. Privacy wasn’t a problem, as rarely were more than two interns