Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [122]
When they pulled out, Sheppard watched the car merge with other traffic until he couldn’t see it anymore.
And later, in a cab, on the way to Susan’s apartment, he couldn’t shake what she’d said. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant by it, if it was merely an offhand remark or her condoning what he was about to do, though he had no idea how she could know. She’d said it with that Mona Lisa smile of hers, both the utterance and her expression impossible to decode; and no matter what she meant or how hard he tried to relegate it to the back of his mind, it had the effect of making the world seem unstable. The palm trees outside appeared so spindly they looked as if they might topple over from their own weight, their armadillo bark splintering open to reveal jagged insides, the houses that climbed straight up the hills from Rodeo Drive seeming in danger, at any second it seemed, of shearing off and tumbling down into the road. Sheppard tried to ignore all this, writing off his anxiety as a symptom of travel, time change, and the effects of moving through great altitudes at high speed. Also, he thought, of his desire to see Susan. Anticipation this extreme, he knew, was close to fear, yet the feeling just wouldn’t go away. It was as if Marilyn had somehow banished him into a dream, with all its mutable landscapes and attendant confrontations, each figure like a puzzle you had to put together or a riddle to be deciphered, with the consequences of failure carrying the potential to ruin your life.
It unnerved him, and made Susan’s apartment building appear even more ominously drab in spite of the blinding sunlight. It was a nondescript three-story complex on North Alfred fashioned of white-painted brick, its courtyard gated off from the street. A fountain stood dead within, the water mottled with algae. On the intercom outside, Susan had written her name next to her roommate’s—Shaw/Hayes—and the very lines of her letters looked scratched instead of penciled, thin and delicate as a bird’s bones. Her voice, when it came over the microphone, was an unrecognizable squawk. “It’s Sam,” he said, then waited, the street silent and empty. The Santa Monica Mountains were visible in the distance. For a moment, it was as if there was no one else alive in the world.
The buzzer sounded and he let himself in, shaking the gate behind him when it closed to make sure. His heels echoed as loudly in the courtyard as in a tunnel. A motorcycle roared past, the engine’s sound ricocheting off the walls, and Sheppard, wincing, put his hands to his ears and turned toward the source but through the bars of the gate saw only the street. Exposed hallways framed the courtyard. The apartment windows had their blinds or curtains drawn. He didn’t know what he expected coming here, just that he expected something else.
He’d expected Susan to be home, for one, but it was her roommate, he realized, who’d spoken to him over the intercom and now answered the door. She was wearing a nurse’s outfit, though her cap was off. Her top two buttons were undone. “You must be the doctor,” she said.
“I am,” he answered, though suddenly paranoid that Susan had even mentioned him.
“I’m Janet,” she said. She took his hand, held it limply and delicately, and then let her arm fall as lifelessly as the other at her side. She invited Sheppard in and he followed her, her hands banging into her hips like clappers on a bell.
“Susan’s not back yet,” she said. “Traffic must be bad.” Her voice was so flat she seemed to form words using the least effort of lips and mouth. She went to the kitchen off to Sheppard’s right. She was making a drink and offered him one, which he declined.