Mr. Peanut (13 page)

“I won’t be home anyway,” she added.

He went to the bathroom and looked through the doorway. Topless, she was combing her hair in front of the mirror, the space still hot from her dryer. Her remarkable voluptuousness—of her cheeks, shoulders, and breasts, her thighs banking inward to her comparatively dainty feet, her body so long untouched—surprised him so utterly that he went weak-kneed with desire. “Where will you be?” he said.

“I have a meeting after school.”

He studied her again. Still she was enormous, but less so. She’d lost more weight than ever before. He should be happy for her. “What kind of meeting?”

She stopped brushing her hair and glanced at his reflection, he thought, like someone considering her options. “A work meeting,” she said.

There’d been a lot of those recently, though for what, or with whom, she wouldn’t say. Admittedly, David, grossly suspicious, had done some detective work. While she was in the shower, he fingered her purse, zippered it open, and gently plucked out her wallet. After removing strange business cards whose names—Dr. Alex Brulov, Dr. Fred Richmond—meant nothing to him, he memorized the numbers for future investigation and read what scribblings Alice had made on them. Some notes were so cryptic they made him positively paranoid:
Meet D at 3 for special
or
Resume Wish: search opps in Ill, Tex, or D.C
. Who was D, and what was so special? And by “resume” did she mean to continue? Or was it résumé for job opportunities in Illinois, Texas, or Washington, D.C.? He checked her cell phone for incoming, outgoing, and missed calls—the names and numbers most often of people Alice worked with or David knew, though when he dialed the ones he didn’t recognize he reached doctors’ offices he’d never heard of and whose receptionists stonewalled him—information about a patient, even a spouse, was confidential—before hanging up. Since she’d opened her own bank account, he checked her check register and flipped through the carbon imprints to get a sense of her financial doings, but nothing looked terribly suspicious. He made surreptitious calls to the school’s office to cross-check her schedule against where she said she’d be, and usually that’s where she was. He cracked her voice-mail password (their anniversary) and listened to several messages, all work related, before snapping the phone shut in shame. He even searched her e-mail account and found nothing there, either, although the screen name, which she hadn’t changed, gave him pause: mrpeanut.

He sat back in his chair and stared at the screen. Was that another lifetime, David wondered, or just yesterday?

It was odd how marriage flattened time, compressed it, hid its passing, time past and time present looping on each other, foreground gone background and back, until the new was the same as the old and the past impossibly novel and strange. For years now, they’d existed in a state of stasis. It was like a dream, an iteration expanding from the center that seemed much longer and much shorter than that. A typical day: He got up to a kitchen he’d cleaned spotless, no matter how elaborate their dinner the night before, and made their coffee. He foamed her milk and added sugar, taking his with milk alone, and carried both cups into the bedroom, waiting while she rearranged the pillows. She looked up at him, ready now, so nearly horizontal that it was like laying a cup on a corpse, her drinking a matter of lifting her lips to the mug instead of the opposite. She thanked him and then turned on the radio, the volume always set to low. They sat together in the
lightening room, David waiting until she was fully awake, then he asked her how she’d slept. If either of them dreamed, they shared, though Alice always revealed more and always relied on him for interpretation. “I have to get up,” she’d finally say. She showered first, in order to get ready for school, while he went to the kitchen to get more coffee, fetch the paper from the front door, and boil himself an egg, thinking over the ruffling water that his life was only a history of such mornings, an ever-growing pile of eggs, the shells by now filling up the kitchen, spilling out into other rooms. He sat at their breakfast nook by the window, all the rooftops lit up by the rising sun, or shiny with rain, or padded with snow, went from the front page to Op Ed to Sports to the satellite’s view of the nation’s weather, always bypassing the first section, the long middle, all to the sound of her hair dryer. There was the quiet time while she put on her makeup. And then she appeared dressed, today’s person. He never once saw her eat breakfast during the week, though every morning she opened the refrigerator for a futile look. She told him good-bye, kissed him, and left. In the quiet apartment, he finished his breakfast, showered, dressed, made the bed, did his dishes, and then left too.

Did she exist during this time? Did she wonder, “Does he?” She called him from school sometime in the morning, just to check in. Usually they discussed dinner, agreed on a menu, said they loved each other. She rarely crossed his mind for the rest of the day. He stopped at the market on the way home. When he arrived at the apartment, she was reading the paper in the kitchen, the first section folded back on itself or her laptop open, and having a snack. They didn’t speak much initially. She was around children all day and needed her quiet time. He made himself whiskey in winter, vodka in summer, the sound of ice cubes hitting the bottom of the glass tracing the very contours of silence. He took a sip, heard the newspaper pages turning. At some unspoken point, he turned on the radio and started cooking. Over dinner, they talked about their respective days, though at times David became aware of his yawning ignorance about most of her life and of hers about his. He did the dishes while she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She put on her pajamas in the bedroom, the one time all day he was sure to see her naked, a sight that made him wonder when her nakedness had stopped being a miracle. And yet it still could be, the sheer R. Crumb fullness of her, the cloud-soft breasts large as throw pillows, their size and perfection demanding attention, there to press an ear against, the heart beating beneath, if he listened closely, as amazing as surf in a shell. Watching his wife approach their bed made his heart race with anticipation, Alice edging toward it like a child at a pool, her plunge requiring both an inner negotiation and a logistical plan: a knee up first and then a slight
fall to her extended hand, the pose held as she timbered slowly toward him, her landing setting the springs creaking, her weight indenting her side of the mattress and rolling him ever so slightly toward her. She put her arm over his chest, the limb so heavy that it was like catching a log. They watched TV, not a fat person in a single commercial unless the advertisement was for losing weight, the same silence between them as intense for commercials with infants (diapers, detergents, toys). Their marriage, David occasionally reflected, could be measured as a sequence of late-night television shows:
Love Connection
, Letterman,
The Daily Show
, someone somewhere writing the show that would carry them through the rest of their lives. “David,” she often asked before he drifted off, “are you going to sleep?” He was. She was too. Did he turn off the television? Did she?

Then it was morning again.

Naturally there were deviations from this routine—he working late, she at a meeting—but he forgot each of them as soon as the next one came. He tested her to ensure he wasn’t alone in this. “I don’t remember either,” she said, and laughed. And of course there were significant events in their lives—that is, history—but for some time now it seemed that recalling them, or plucking a coherent narrative from this mindless flow, this endless reloop, required the mental effort of reconstruction, a focused recollection of things prior to this long tranquillity that were overwhelmed by and set apart from the here and now. But perhaps that was
exactly
the task at hand, David thought, the only way out. For underneath this there were unspoken truths, things that had happened or they were waiting for that comprised the very bedrock of their marriage, which went beyond issues and that David boiled down to three:

She was fat.

His book wasn’t done.

And Mr. Peanut.

In the summer of 2004, their eighth year together, he and Alice began to talk about having children.

David remembered the year clearly because Spellbound Games, the company he and Frank Cady started, had just released their first shooter, Bang You’re Dead! for play on Xbox. Within months, it was a hit worldwide. Negative press was a huge boon. CNN did a story on it, as did
60 Minutes
and the
New York Times
. He and Frank were even interviewed on
Larry King Live
. The game, rated M for Mature, took place in a sprawling public school, its rules the same as the game from childhood. When you
spotted an opponent, you pointed your hand—an imaginary gun—and fired and said, “Bang, you’re dead!” and he or she mimed a dramatic death. In David and Cady’s version, you began by choosing your avatar’s clique—the Jocks, the Goths, the Cheerleaders, the Nerds, the Geeks, or the Teachers, to name a few, each having specific defensive powers and various forms of agility and mobility. Then you chose your own appearance, from hair color to race to body type. Finally—and this was what really made it great—you chose your weapon, your gun: Laser-Pointer Hand, Spitball Hand, Static-Electricity Hand, Rubber-Band-Gun Hand, Cootie Hand, Acid Hand, Dry-Ice Hand, Bunsen-Burner Hand, Taser Hand, Mace Hand, and Dragon-Touch Hand, each appendage popping on and off like a prosthetic, as outsize as Popeye’s forearms, mechanized and interchangeable and carrying, of course, limited ammunition or charges, multiple hands to be amassed and replenished over the course of the game, which took place during a single school day. The goal was to wipe out every other clique until you ruled the school. The graphics were cartoonish, pure Super Mario, the carnage spectacular, especially with the Dragon-Touch Hand (risky because you had to get close enough to touch your opponent, fabulous because his or her head exploded on contact). There were single, multiplayer, and massive multiplayer options, and soon kids all over the world were having it out online. The media response was huge and psychologists took sides. Some thought the game fomented violence and it would encourage school shootings; others thought it provided a cathartic, nonphysical release. Parents were outraged. Gamers bought it up like candy.

“Did you play Bang You’re Dead! when you were a kid?” David said to an enraged caller on
Larry King
. “You didn’t think anybody was dying, did you? Did you kill someone because you played it? Clearly not, because here you are, talking to me. I think kids today can tell the difference too. So bang! You’re dead! Next caller, please.”

Development and royalty money began to flow into Spellbound like mad, so much so that he bought their apartment outright that year. Lying in bed, each with a drink in hand, each exhausted, she buried beneath tests and lesson plans, lines of code and images from playtests burned onto his retinas, talk about children seemed to have arisen naturally, what with their successful adulthoods opening before them like a pair of wings. They’d met at a small college in Virginia, David in grad school in computer design, Alice getting her undergraduate degrees in mathematics and education. After marrying a year later, they’d agreed that what they wanted first and foremost was to get established. Now in their late twenties and early thirties (she and he respectively), they felt blessed by luck, by their jobs—Alice was
teaching at the Trinity School—and by each other, but most of all by the most precious commodity in Manhattan: space.

It was a conversation that lasted for months, the first stage of conception, really, this future only one of many to make it downstream and penetrate their brains, of boy or girl and what constituted being ready, of favorite names—all of this wheat separated from the chaff of old boyfriends and girlfriends, despised classmates and beloved teachers, cousins and enemies, one-night stands and dead pets, a veritable discarded universe of bad associations and ridiculous situations. Collectively, it evoked in David a mixture of feelings. Giddiness, on the one hand. Children were marriage’s magic, making it a family. To make a child was like pushing the button to trigger the obverse of nuclear war: mutually assured creation. The willful act of utterly altering your lives, it was
radical
. Even the attempt to make one potentially changed everything. For there were no guarantees, David thought now, were there? Though you started the process believing there were. Yet at the same time their talk sparked frustration, anxiety, and often struck him as pure abstraction and, to a degree, distraction. It made him defensive. Selfishly, he wondered if Alice didn’t love him as much as she used to. It made him worry their sex life had fizzled somehow, that Alice was bored, and that a child, with all of its attendant busyness and business, served to replace something that was fading between them. Because a child would be the end of something, he’d thought then. It would be the end of
just them
.

He didn’t tell this to his wife.

The conversation was continuous and knew no boundaries or schedule. They picked up with it at breakfast or when they called each other from work. It was never a non sequitur and always fair game. It was always there. A child spotted on the street, on the bus, peeking over the seat of an airplane at the two of them like a cuddly Kilroy, appearing at the table at a couple-with-kids dinner party, often with a gorgeous sitter in tow, as if she were a fringe benefit to the whole package, the child’s hair still tubby-time wet, Johnson & Johnson clean, pj’s smelling pristine, boy or girl or the whole brood well-behaved, crazy-cute, super-smart, early-to-bed-and-late-to-rise—“Easy,” according to the parents. Their children were allusions to David and Alice’s private discussions, to their marriage’s next chapter, procreation’s promise of happiness if his mood was right. And if it was wrong, a child was some sort of conspiracy by which those with children could rope the two of them into the same situation. His knee-jerk reaction was that he had to rebel.