Mr peanut, p.35
Mr. Peanut, page 35
The boy was in his pajamas, with a balsa-wood airplane, a glider, in his hands. “Dad, will you please help me fix this?”
Sheppard looked at it. The wing was broken on the left side, split but not shorn away. The boy almost never came to him for help. “It’s past your bedtime,” he said, rubbing his hair, “but since you asked like an adult, yes. Let’s go see what we can do.”
By now Marilyn and Nancy were seated in front of the television, talking lazily, Nancy lying on the couch. Don sat by the radio, the top of his head pressed against the wall and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, staring so intently while he listened it was as if there was a screen there.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Nancy said.
“No,” Marilyn said. “There’s an ashtray on the patio.”
She got up. As Sheppard passed by Marilyn’s chair she reached out to him, taking his forearm in her fingers and gliding her nails down his wrist and across his palm.
“We’re going to fix his airplane,” Sheppard said.
“Before you do that,” she said, “will you lock the patio door?” But Nancy was already locking it, the ashtray in her other hand.
In the basement, Sheppard turned on the light, led the boy over to his workshop, got his Elmer’s glue, and explained to Chip how to spread it lightly across the bottom of the wing, struggling to keep his patience as the boy squirted the white liquid onto the tabletop. “You have to squeeze it carefully,” Sheppard said. He found a bunch of clothespins in a bucket by his tools and handed him two of them. “Now,” he said, “how can you clip these on so the wing holds its original shape?” He watched, so exhausted he thought he might fall asleep right here, as the boy pinched the wing between the clothespins and looked to him for confirmation, thinking again that something was wrong with him. There was a fissure in his character that made him manifestly uncertain of everything. When he fixed the clothespins on each side of the wing, pinching it back into shape, Sheppard was sure that the plane was permanently crippled.
“Do you think it will fly again?”
“We’ll see,” Sheppard said, turning the plane upside down with the broken wing atop a tin can, the weight of the body helping to restore its aerodynamic line.
Chip’s shrug was a perfect imitation of his mother. “At least we tried,” he said.
Upstairs, Sheppard handed him off to Marilyn, who took him to his room, and then he sat down in her chair and crossed his arms.
“Are you cold?” Nancy asked.
“A little,” he said. On the television screen, a man in a suit was standing next to the Planters Peanuts character, talking to the mascot as if he weren’t dressed in an absurd costume, his only replies coming in hand signals and dance moves. “What are we watching?” Sheppard said.
“A brief word from our sponsor,” Nancy said.
“Is there anything else?”
“There’s a movie coming on in a second.”
Feeling Nancy’s eyes on the back of his head, he turned around and saw her lying on their sofa smoking a cigarette, the top two buttons of her blouse undone.
“I’m sorry about the boy,” she said.
“I am too,” he said.
“Do you dream about it—about things that happen to you during the day?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
He’d always found Nancy attractive. She seemed to realize this, acted like she felt the same way about him, and always spoke very intimately whenever they were alone. This, however, made their conversations weirdly stilted.
She nodded at him weightily, utterly stumped.
There was a time when he’d looked for sex everywhere, trying to sniff out discontent or interest in every woman he met, as if every interaction was like a door to a new opportunity, another possible reality, every conversation not about the thing itself but something else. Now everything had shifted back.
Marilyn came downstairs. “I think he’s going to sleep,” she whispered, then sat in his lap and buried her face in his neck, putting her lips to his ear. “He’s going to sleep,” she said, and the words themselves made him shiver in pleasure.
Behind them, Don clapped once and winced in guilt at the noise he’d made. “Sorry,” he said. “The Indians won,” and then he looked at Sheppard and Marilyn and then at his wife, who said, “I need some affection too.”
He cleared his throat and moved over to the sofa, where she laid her head across his lap. “How’s that?” he said, and patted her shoulder.
Nancy looked at Marilyn and shook her head.
“Well, it’s something,” she said.
The movie was called Strange Holiday and from what Sheppard could gather—with Marilyn nuzzling his cheek and neck—it was about a man who goes off on a fishing trip in the deep woods and returns to find the country taken over by fascists. He could’ve poked a hundred holes in the premise but instead he pressed his face into Marilyn’s hair.
“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 would help you,” Marilyn said. “Please, don’t take that wrong. It’s just … you have be willing to hold your breath longer than you think you can,” she said.
She was sitting on the daybed with Sam now, stroking his hair. He was sprawled there in the shape of an S, facing her, his corduroy jacket on, hugging himself, his mouth open. He looked like Chip, like a boy. There was just room enough to lie alongside him and she did, listening to him breathing …
She woke. She was cold. She thought to wake Sam but it would take the same effort as it did Chip, and he slept down here all the time. She walked up the stairs to their room and took off her clothes in the dark, folding them neatly and setting them on the chair, putting on her pajamas and then getting under the cold sheets. She was tired of sleeping alone. She didn’t care anymore if Sam woke her up. She’d asked him to push the mattresses together last week, or buy them a new bed. “I want to feel you next to me at night,” she’d said. She’d remind him tomorrow.
Waiting for sleep to come, she couldn’t help it: she thought about Dick Eberling, first about his body revealed in that window as he cleaned it, the plaited armadillo shell of muscles along his stomach, his dark skin browned. She bit her lower lip gently, remembering how he’d looked at the floor and asked if she could like someone like him and then, “For a long time?” It made her sad. Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like—to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all of the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.
To her delight, she heard footsteps slowly rising up the stairs and entering the room. She turned around and saw his approaching form.
“Sam?” she said.
“So,” Mobius said.
“So,” Sheppard said.
“Quid pro quo.”
Sheppard reached under his chair and held up the manuscript.
“Is this the only copy?”
“No. But it is the original.”
Sheppard slid it through the bars. Mobius hefted the pages.
“You have until tomorrow morning to read it,” Sheppard said.
“All right.”
“Then you’ll tell me everything I need to know about Alice Pepin.”
“Everything you need to know is right here.”
“No, it’s not,” Sheppard said. “There’s no ending.”
“There will be,” Mobius said.
Sheppard folded up his chair and carried it with him to the guard, who buzzed him out. “He’s a suicide risk,” Sheppard said. “Check his cell every ten minutes. And get a doctor over here immediately. Have his bandages removed and the gauze confiscated. I don’t want him to have anything he can hurt himself with. Get two other guards and strip-search him. And recheck his cell. Strip his bed. Not even a blanket for the night. The only thing he can have in there is the book he’s reading.”
“Yessir.”
Despite those orders, Sheppard thought about Mobius all day. He called downstairs to the guard repeatedly and even returned to the cellblock twice. On both occasions he entered to the sound of Mobius laughing, then stood before the bars as he sat there with tears in his eyes, pointing to the page.
“This is killing me,” he said.
Seeing him calmed Sheppard down. Mobius’s gauze dressing had been replaced with plastic bandages, the guard had checked the cell three times to make sure, and when Sheppard called later that evening, Mobius had just finished dinner without incident. Over the phone, Sheppard could hear him cackling in the background.
Sheppard went to bed. He slept fitfully at first, then slipped into a deep sleep and dreamed, and when he woke he remembered the whole thing completely.
He was back on the beach, chasing down his wife’s killer. But the killer was Mobius, and his wife Alice Pepin. He finally tackled the little man, but he was remarkably strong and as slippery as a fish. When Sheppard tried to punch him, he whiffed, and when he tried to grapple and pin him, Mobius reversed the hold and threw him to the sand. And once again he was overwhelmed, Mobius above him now, his knees pressed to his chest, his fist raised to his ear for the final blow. And before Sheppard woke, before Mobius’s punch fell and blackness came on, he suffered that same sense of terrible defeat, of having not been able to save his wife or overcome her killer, of somehow being an accomplice in the crime.
The phone.
He turned on the light by his nightstand, rubbed his eyes, looked at his watch. It was 4:15.
“Sir,” the guard said. “It’s Mobius.”
“What happened?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Sheppard sat up. “How?”
“Asphyxiation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He choked to death, sir.”
“On what?”
“I can’t say a hundred percent. The paramedics are finishing up now. But it looks like he blocked his windpipe swallowing pages from that novel.”
But the middle, David wrote, is long and hard.
He meant his book and he meant his marriage. At some point his book had become his marriage, or consumed his marriage. Or else his marriage had consumed his book. Did real writers suffer such problems? He certainly didn’t consider himself one. Real writers kept the boundaries between art and life clear, didn’t they? Knew dreams from days. They had to. Otherwise, how could they discern the arc of a story or recognize their themes? Ride narrative logic like a wave, from swell to shore. His book had become something entirely different. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was him. It was Alice. It was them.
His book had become an act of cannibalism.
In the five years since her miscarriages, he and Alice had lived the same routine with minor deviations, and he hadn’t made a lick of progress on his book. He hadn’t written himself into a corner: he’d written himself into a round. His book and his marriage had become a long wait for something to happen.
So he welcomed this recent turn of events. True, he hadn’t needed her to be hospitalized for them to come about, but now Alice was going to change her life! He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but chances were it was something new.
In the meantime, however, she remained remote, quick to temper and slow to warm; they hadn’t made love in months. Sometimes, when he came home, he caught her on the phone, which quietly she hung up. “Who was that?” he’d asked. “No one,” she’d say. And they left it at that. Her laptop was off-limits. Her cell phone bill was, of late, nowhere to be found. Her bank and credit card statements were gone. She was going off the grid. She often worked late. She went to suspicious meetings about which she told him nothing, wearing full-on makeup and her nicest clothes. “What’s all this?” he’d asked. “What’s what?” she’d say. He regarded her for a moment. How much weight had she lost? Twenty pounds? Thirty? None at all? He couldn’t say she looked good, just less. But less, in Alice’s case, was still more. Was she having an affair?
“I’m going to the gym,” Alice told him one day.
He watched from the peephole until she was on the elevator, then rushed down the eight flights of stairs. He followed her east, toward Third Avenue, where she signaled for a taxi and landed one immediately. But when David tried to hail one, there were none to be found.
They never have these problems in movies, he thought, giving up.
He called a car service the next day and instructed the driver to wait on Third. But leaving the building she turned left toward Lexington, their one-way street headed east, and by the time the car made it around the block, Alice was gone.
He called two car services the next day, had one car waiting on Third, the other on Lex, canceling the latter once she headed east.
“Follow that cab,” he told the driver.
“Seriously?” the man said.
“Just do your fucking job, all right?”
Characters in movies never have to park either, and if they do, there’s always a space. If they’re in a rush, they never have to start a PC. There were never delays. In the plots, no time was ever wasted, and why was that?
She got out at the Y.
Why, for that matter, did every Y smell the same? That particular brand of human humidity, of armpit and sweat sock mixed with a healthy dash of pool chlorine. Every time he’d been here, the same retarded man in his caricature’s costume (thick-rimmed drugstore specs, YMCA logo on his T-shirt, too-short shorts, high tops with black socks pulled up knee high) was vacuuming the premises. Were those the only clothes he owned? Was vacuuming all he had to do? “You missed a spot,” David told him, and pointed, and the man thanked him and obediently pushed his machine toward the phantom dirt. David cut through the men’s locker room, a place, he thought, only Dante could have dreamed up. It wasn’t that it was rank or befouled. In fact, it was quite clean and well-lit, the freshly laundered towels as warm as baked bread. By the sinks, combs stood submerged in canisters of Clubman cologne. But there were monsters here, of the human kind, men built of circles and blocks attached to each other who all seemed compelled to walk around naked, blissfully unaware, apparently, of their own deformities, as unselfconscious as children. Dripping with sweat from the steam room or sauna, their skin as red as cooked lobsters, they approached other men as casually as if they’d bumped into each other on the street. “Leland,” one said, “how the hell are you doing?” and the other replied, “Slim, how the hell have you been?” I’m not looking at your penis, David imagined was the subtitle followed by, I’m not looking at your penis either. But he looked. It was strictly an underworld fascination, exactly what Virgil was on to when he offered the tour: such a broad selection, such a wide range of shapes and sizes, you couldn’t help but look. Elephant penises, horse cocks, dog dicks, Jewish men’s shlongs, and donkey dongs. Penises with one nut descended, with one nut, with no nuts at all. Micros on giants, macros on midgets, and vice versa. Black men’s penises, the heads as pink as a dog’s tongue, in sizes confirming and debunking every stereotype; Oriental penises confirming and debunking same. Circumcised penises, the foreskin pulled as tight as a facelift, so little give as they hung flaccid that it looked like they’d hurt getting hard. Even pierced penises—Prince Alberts, they were called—with the hoop poked into the shaft and out the urethra like an ox’s nose ring. It was a panopticon of penises, a field of phalluses, and in the presence of so much dick all David could think of was how no laws seemed to govern the universe—no guaranteed gifts for the good or punishments for the bad, no fairness in what the Lord giveth or taketh away, except for the undeniable fact of corporeality, and thus one’s own death.
