Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [119]
He continued to rock.
“Are you going to say anything?” she said.
“Wouldn’t that violate our agreement?”
Marilyn’s face darkened. She threw the ashtray at his head and it hit the chair beside his left ear and shattered—a sound like a lightbulb bursting. The pebble-spray hissed against his cheek. His fingertips, after he touched his face, were covered in blood.
By the time he looked up from them, she was out the door. He listened to her car start, the tires peel, and sat rocking for a long time.
He tried to feel the coagulation: the heat of new blood inflaming the wound; the rush of white cells and platelets layering beneath the cut like so much brick; the blood already scabbed, hard as dried glue within minutes.
Later, when Kokie came onto the porch, he let her lick his fingers. Finished, she lay with a thud at his feet and sighed.
If life was always like this, he wondered, if it was always this quiet, would he be sitting here now longing for noise?
She would come home, he decided. In the past he might’ve wondered; he might’ve worried or he might’ve hoped. The trick, of course, was to understand that things righted themselves sooner or later. Decisions were forced on you, or else finally made.
Marriage was a long wait.
One evening in late November, Susan called him at home. Marilyn was upstairs bathing Chip, and it was blind luck he answered the phone. “I need to see you,” Susan said, sounding terribly upset. When he asked where to pick her up, she told him to come to her parents’ apartment. The meaning of this didn’t register on him until he was in the car, having told Marilyn there was an emergency at the hospital. It was raining out, a terrible late-fall storm, and so cold it was nearly sleeting, the wind full of leaves that caught in the wiper blades or pressed like starfish against his windshield. When he turned into the lot at the apartment house, Susan appeared in his headlights. She’d been standing outside and was soaked, and when she got in the car it made the interior feel colder. She was sobbing.
He drove, though he didn’t need to go far. On a night like this, nobody could see anything out their windows, let alone into his. He parked on a side street. It was as good as private.
“Bob and I, we’re not … ” She wept again. “We’re not getting married.” She pressed her eyes to her arm and then looked at him. Even crying she looked beautiful. “He said he isn’t ready.” She started to laugh. “You might see how I found that funny.”
Sheppard offered her his hand.
“I want to be married,” she said. “But I want to be in love.” She took his hand and looked at him imploringly. “Do you want to be in love?”
“I do,” Sheppard said.
She pulled him toward her and kissed him. Her face was cold. “I needed to see you,” she whispered. “I needed to see you when Bob was gone to see if it changed anything.” She kissed him again and he kissed her in return, his desire for her endless and inexplicable. She pressed her hand between his legs. “And it hasn’t.”
“No,” he said.
“Has it changed anything for you?”
“No,” he said, thinking to himself: Why would it?
She’d already unbuckled his belt. “So you see,” she said, kissing him, “we’re always like this, you and I.” He lifted himself up and she pushed down his pants. “We could always be like this.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you want that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not afraid to have this kind of joy.”
Joy? It struck him as the oddest word for her to use because he’d never thought of their time together as being joyous. Theirs was a brand of freedom they created and affirmed, a kind of carnal honesty coupled with an ecstatic lack of restraint and words, words, words. He’d admired her directness, how she’d mow down anything that got in the way of having him. Even now the pleasure she took in pleasing him revealed itself as generosity, just as when hitting a tennis ball with Marilyn she could somehow magically make you play better. But joy? This Sheppard reserved for his wife, no matter what was happening—or not—between them. Joy was her province. Joy was the first time he’d kissed her, when