Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [144]
Marilyn grabbed her watch in disbelief. “Oh, God,” she said. “When are we due at the Aherns’?”
“Quarter to seven.”
“How the hell am I going to get dinner ready?”
He shrugged and said, “I’ll help.” And she gave him a look, standing up herself and pulling on her underwear, her shorts, buttoning her bra, her blouse. “I don’t need that kind of help.”
Of course it would be disingenuous to pretend they’d simply sailed on after that moment, he thought as he woke Chip. Too much had happened. There was too much history. Weeks later, after they’d returned from California, sure now that they were in the clear, he’d come home to find Marilyn in the kitchen, smoking and staring out the window onto Lake Road. She didn’t turn when he greeted her, and when he asked where Chip was, she explained she’d sent him off to her father’s house for the evening. On the table before her was the expense report, the amounts circled in red—for the hotel room, the repairs to Michael’s car, the watch—all these pages forwarded from the hospital by Donna, along with a personal letter from Susan that said, he imagined, that everything was over.
“Go ahead,” Marilyn said. “I’m waiting.”
He sighed, then recounted everything that had happened with her in California clinically and dispassionately—how he’d felt about it: “That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before Big Sur,” he said. “Before now.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, watching its last smoke rise, its odor fade, an odd combination of anger and humility pervading the room. “You think,” she said, her voice both choked and furious, “in straight lines.” She lit up again, then wrapped one arm around her waist and propped her elbow against her hand. “Like there’s a beginning and an end.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“This.” She picked up the papers on the table and shook them. “This is the same thing all over again. We just go round and round.”
“No,” he insisted. “That was before.”
Marilyn took a long drag on her cigarette. “I’m going to my father’s,” she said.
He was in no position to argue. There was, he believed, a beginning and an end. The walls had tumbled down. They were off the loop, but only if she believed.
She stayed at her father’s for a week. They didn’t speak for three full days. After that, she called him once in the morning, once at the hospital every afternoon, and once at night. They didn’t say much to each other, virtually nothing at all. She just wanted to know where he was, she said. He kept the house as clean as he could manage, but when she returned a week later with their boy, her first words were, “What a wreck.” And later, after sending Chip upstairs, she said, “Prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“That it’s going to improve.”
It required nothing miraculous of him. He simply had to be there, for Marilyn and for his son. There, as in inhabiting his life at home. There, as in treating now first. On a practical level it was the simplest thing: He took the boy off his wife’s hands when he returned from work. When she asked him for something—a favor, a last-second errand, or help with a household chore—he gave it. When she came to bed they talked. But spiritually and psychologically it was entirely different and required what couldn’t be faked: he was there. Whereas before he’d seen his wife and son as a kind of encroachment on his life, their needs as something that halved and rehalved the distance between him and what he wanted, and he’d therefore at every turn resisted every little thing asked of him, now he did the opposite. And he could feel the small joy it added to everything, and which in turn added accrued interest. It was so simple, really. He was just there, which was not only what Marilyn wanted but also what he discovered he did too, and which had the effect of spreading his joy to her, that same joy enfolding their lives as if under a giant set of wings. It was Marilyn who had, a month later and