Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [150]
“Do you know what I was thinking about?” she whispered.
“Tell me.”
She slid her hand down between her legs and his and squeezed. “I was thinking about Sandusky.”
“That was nice,” he said.
“Sandusky was very nice,” she said.
He thought for a moment of the cottage they’d rented there just two weekends ago, having sex morning and night. Marilyn was rubbing him now as surreptitiously as possible and he wanted to laugh, feeling as aroused as he’d been earlier when watching her take that drink from Nancy between their houses. He’d driven in an amateur car race that weekend, his penis sore between his legs, thrumming with every lap, and every time he roared by the grandstand he’d been able to pick Marilyn out among the hundreds of people, as if hers was the only face not in motion, her features strangely distinct.
“Are you sleeping?” she said.
“Let me get up,” he said.
“Stay.”
“I’ll be back.” Then he got up and went to the daybed and lay down.
He slept.
He sat up. Everyone was watching the movie, and Marilyn turned to him as if somehow signaled by his waking. She waved him over as he rubbed his eyes. “Come watch,” she said.
He looked at the screen: a man seated behind bars was repeating the same phrase over and over.
“Come on, Sam,” she said. She tilted her head and smiled. “It’s going to improve.”
He chuckled at the allusion and then lay down again and looked at her, his arms crossed over his chest like in a Mexican standoff, and he smiled back. She shrugged and turned around. He stared at the back of her head for a moment, at her hair through the bars of the rocker, at her blouse with its little wing designs, at the athletic curve of her legs, one crossed over the other, at the moccasins on her feet. She’d let one half slip off and was tapping it against her heel.
It is possible, he thought, to be completely happy in marriage—though you must be willing to hold on when your ship was lost at sea and there was no guarantee of rescue. They had both held on, at times by means unbeknownst to the other that might not look to an outsider like holding on at all. It is possible to be completely happy. And just as surely that happiness could pass. It was a fact. As it was that when the new came, it seemed like it would last forever, endure as a permanent blessing, carrying with it the promise that it could be tended, like a flame. Tend this, he thought. Let it last.
Pleased, he slipped off to sleep.
Marilyn woke.
She was still in the rocking chair when Don gently shook her shoulder and she looked up at him, startled. Except for the kitchen, nearly all the lights were out in the house, and Marilyn could hear Nancy putting up the last of the plates. “Don’t do any more,” she said, standing up and squinting in the brightness.
“I’m done,” Nancy said, and smiled, folding up the dish towel.
“What time is it?”
“Twelve thirty,” Don whispered.
They walked quietly through the kitchen and said good-bye and Marilyn was about to close the door but stopped for a moment to listen to the wind whipping the trees, then turned out the light, locked the door, and through the window watched the Aherns walking across the lawn under the trees, Nancy’s arms crossed.
Poor woman, she thought. Earlier, in the lull after dessert, the two of them talking quietly by the sink, she’d said, “He doesn’t touch me, and that’s fine. I can take that. We’re busy. Him especially. But he avoids me. He’s avoiding me now. We get a moment together and he says, ‘The game, Nancy, I’ve been waiting to listen to it,’ as if this was the only game ever played. Watch, and you’ll see how he keeps a space between us, like we’re brother and sister chasing each other around a table.” She wiped her eyes. “How did you change things with Sam?”
Marilyn didn’t know. It wasn’t anything she did. What she believed was that she’d just waited, that Sam had somehow been waiting too, until and at the same time they were both tired of waiting.
There was no other way to put it.
“It’s nothing that