Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [117]
That summer, just days after Susan returned to Cleveland, to Bay Village, Dr. Stevenson’s ring on her finger, just minutes after she and Sam met at a motel in Avon, just moments after they had sex, Sheppard burst out, “I love you.”
And he knew this was untrue, an utterance that was merely a veil over love’s absence; like sonar, it was a shouting out to receive an echo back. But saying it and then cursing himself for the loss of control, he partially realized why.
For over a year, he and Marilyn had been almost completely chaste, a year interrupted by nights of drunkenness, late evenings with the Aherns or the Houks, with his brothers’ families, Sheppard counting Marilyn’s drinks and watching them empty like sand in an hourglass until she took his arm and notified him that the room was spinning. “Take me home,” she said. He excused them, helped her into the car, helped her out when they arrived at their house, watched her stand smiling at the sitter, deaf and dumb, red-eyed and heavy-lidded during the report on Chip, Sheppard paying the girl and seeing her out while Marilyn staggered upstairs, biding his time by the refrigerator drinking water with Alka-Seltzer and then standing over her bed while he removed his clothes and pulled hers off as he would a child’s while she mumbled a sometimes happy, sometimes angry protest. And finally he fell upon her, kissing her with passion, putting her hand on his cock to which she ministered semiconsciously and burying his face between her legs to taste something of Susan, struggling to conjure her when Marilyn, in a burst of wakefulness, sat on his hips and pumped away, Sheppard pinching his imagination to its limits of vividness until for a second Susan was there. And then he lifted Marilyn’s hips and moved her whole lower body off his when he came, because the diaphragm wasn’t in. He threw the covers over her afterward and crawled into his own bed, so shocked at himself that for the longest time he couldn’t sleep.
“Oh, Sam,” Susan had said, “I love you too.”
Yet they saw each other far less than before. Once a week, perhaps. Sometimes they might not even speak for three. It was partially logistics; Susan lived with Robert now. And it was something else. She’d changed. In her year away, she’d gained weight—fifteen pounds, maybe. It was becoming on her. He could no longer see her ribs; her hips had widened slightly. “The food up there,” she said, “it’s all meat and cheese.” She’d also taken up smoking: Chesterfields, like Marilyn, but Sheppard didn’t enjoy watching her as he did his wife. Susan inhaled and exhaled almost immediately, without relish in the act and probably how she’d seen a movie star do it, whereas it remained the most sensual thing Marilyn did—at least when he managed to catch her at it.
“What is it?” Susan asked him. They were lying in a motel bed. (It was September already.) She was under the covers, the ashtray resting on her belly. Sheppard watched as she stubbed out the remaining half of her cigarette.
“Nothing,” he said.
She put the ashtray on the bedside table, then flung off the covers. When she put on her panties and bra, she did it with her back to him. “I think we have to stop this now,” she said. She found her skirt, snapped it like a sheet twice, then stepped into it.
“All right.”
“I want you to stop calling me,” she said. “I want you to promise.” And when he didn’t speak, she whirled on him. “I said I want you to promise.”
“I promise,” Sheppard said.
He called her a week later. It gave him an odd sense of delight, her silence on the phone when she answered, the ease with which she broke down. “I’ll be at the Perkins motel in an hour,” he said. “If you’re not there, I understand.” He waited in the room, not even bothering to turn on the lights or the radio, lying on the bed with his suit still on, his hands clasped behind his head, making bets as to how long it would take her to arrive. When she knocked softly, he let her in and sat down as she stood beside the bed. Then he pulled her down next to him. She let him kiss her