Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [129]
Sheppard, ashamed and furious, couldn’t look at him.
“You leave early,” Michael said. “Like this morning. Take the car. I don’t give a damn. Drive yourself to a hotel and knock yourself out. But do not be here when Emma wakes up. Because I swear I don’t know what she’ll do if you are. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Sheppard said.
Oddly, the confrontation imparted clarity. Why was he waiting? What was wrong with him? He checked them into the Argyle Hotel the next morning.
The move seemed to confirm something for Susan, somehow thrilling her. When he got back from the hospital that evening, she had fresh flowers on the dresser and a martini just poured for him from a shaker. “Welcome home, Doctor,” she said, walking toward him with the glass in her hands. And even before he could finish his drink she was on him like the woman she had been three years ago, hungry and inventive and tireless, though afterward, in the semidarkness, she said, “Tell me what you wanted to say. I’ve been waiting, Sam. I’ve been waiting patiently.”
“Do you mean that I love you?” he said.
“You’ve said that before,” she told him. “But you can say it again if you’d like.”
Her insistence put him on the defensive. “Maybe some food will jar my memory,” he joked.
While they dressed, she turned quiet and made herself another drink; and when he came up behind her at the mirror and took her by the shoulders, she stiffened. Now it was Sheppard who talked to fill the silence, who tried to turn the conversation to something … like his training. He’d always enjoyed talking with her about it. Unlike Marilyn she was knowledgeable—she knew what questions not to ask—but he couldn’t coax her from her funk.
Over dessert, while he was describing that afternoon’s procedure, she dropped her spoon and it clattered loudly in her dish. “When do you leave?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Here,” she said. “Los Angeles. When do you go?”
“I leave on Sunday,” he said. “You know that.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “And when do you come back? Or do you?”
“I do,” he said.
“When?” she snapped. The couple at the table next to them glanced over. “Say when. Say something specific.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Don’t treat me like a child.”
“Please,” he said, “this isn’t easy for me.” He had traction here; it was true, after all. “Was it easy for you to leave?”
He reached for her hand but she ripped it away and crossed her arms.
“Imagine what it’s like for me,” he said.
“I’ve already done my part,” she said.
They sat staring in separate directions for a time. He paid the bill and they left without speaking. But when they returned to the room, she said, “I’m sorry. I’ll be more patient.” She came up behind him at the mirror and laid her entire weight against him. “I promise I will,” she said.
Later, they made love, and it began as something tender but turned vicious and abandoned. She fell asleep quickly afterward, and her breath, as she snored lightly, smelled of garlic. It was odd to be awake; he always fell asleep before his wife. He found himself floating through foggy recollections of her busying herself while he drifted off, his awareness in that netherworld of her reading a book next to him, or doing the dishes softly downstairs, of a light being on in the house that should be off by now, or the sound of the porch door rapping closed, which meant she’d slipped out for a cigarette. He thought of her expression again, of what she’d said about too much fun. It was a form of mockery, he thought now, a brand of maternal ribbing of a silly boy. He got up, naked, walked to the window and stared at downtown Los Angeles. Its skyline, bunched and piled in the distance, sat protected by all the lit flatness surrounding it. You never felt in Los Angeles. It always seemed somewhere out there that you were trying to get to, so this view was in fact the perfect view, as if you were a nomad camping for the night in the outlands before making the final push across the peneplain in the morning …
He was out the door well before six the next day. He’d done