Mr. Peanut (2 page)

His love for his wife was renewed. When Alice ate, she leaned over her plate and chewed dreamily, staring into blankness, a void that hovered just off to the side of David’s left breast. Every few bites, she tucked her hair neatly behind her ear—her mind running through fields, eating always relaxed her—and youthfulness was restored to her features. She was the young woman he had married. With a bit of imagination—Alice was now thirty-five—he could make out the girl she was before they’d met. He didn’t disturb her. She was very hungry. How could he have dreamed of losing her?

In one fantasy, he saw himself at her funeral. Mourners surrounded him, besieging him with condolences. During the service, people spoke about her beautifully, though she was such a loner, David thought, he wasn’t sure who they’d be. Later, Alice was interred, the oversized casket lowered into the ground. Then all he saw was himself, sitting there bereft. He couldn’t imagine what he would do afterward. He might as well be like that little dog, Greyfriars Bobby, and sleep by her grave. Pepin shuddered. He was here to support her. His love for his wife was renewed. And then one day, Alice began to lose weight.

B
efore any undertaking, Detective Sheppard thought, we have our rituals. Like deep knee bends before a run or a hitter’s crotch grab as he steps up to the plate. Efforts to prime the pump. The mind, body, and soul’s preshot routine. Habit’s comfort, Sheppard thought, loading his pipe, and habit’s effect. The carpet worn down from our usual route through the house. Gums brushed away from the teeth over time. Tastes we’ve sampled so often we can’t detect them anymore. At the police station, Sheppard spied an old whore putting on makeup, fascinated by the delicacy with which she painted on her lipstick, how she held the mirror out before her as if she were aiming a precision instrument, turning her head from side to side in the small reflection, checking her work, then snapping the compact closed and dropping it in her bag, ready to hear charges.

Murder, Sheppard reflected further, is an interruption of habit, or its culmination.

But before any undertaking, Sheppard thought, even an interrogation, the same motions apply. We orbit, we repeat. Already Detective Hastroll would be sitting before the one-way glass, staring down the suspect, thrilling, Sheppard imagined, to his own invisibility. It was always remarkable to Sheppard that you could feel Hastroll feeling you when you entered a room. Hastroll kept his back to him, staring down the suspect all the while, analyzing and focusing. And yet there was that subtle reaction Sheppard noticed as soon as he stepped inside, not a move on Hastroll’s part so much as a transmission of energy. Like something electrical. It was almost as if he could feel Hastroll blink in slow disgust at his arrival.

“Ward.”

“Sam.”

“What do you think?”

“Guilty,” Hastroll said flatly. “Guilty as sin.”

Sheppard stood next to his partner. Behind the glass, the suspect, David Pepin, sat weeping.

“You could at least go either way on this one, Ward—a shadow of a doubt, at least. The man’s in an authentic state of distress.”

“Guilty,” Hastroll said, his huge humped shoulders hunched. “Guilty distress.”

“How about aggrieved distress?”

“Guilty, guilty, guilty.”

The two men gazed at the suspect for a time.

“Good cop first or bad cop?”

“You go,” Hastroll said.

There is the same thrill of one-way glass, Hastroll thought, as in hearing the sound of your voice recorded. Or catching sight of yourself in the background of a photograph. Or passing yourself on a television screen in an electronics storefront—a peep of a view as your image walks toward you. For you are always a secret to yourself, Hastroll thought. But there are glimpses and hints and clues.

Sheppard entered the interrogation room and sat directly across from Pepin.

“Don’t even ask me,” Pepin cried. “I didn’t kill my wife!”

A
dmittedly, Alice’s diet was different this time.

In the past they required various kinds of equipment, ranging from the usual to the late-night television commercial—Visa, Amex, MasterCard accepted. The nonsense approach, David called it. There were pills and special sponges, protein shakes and magic reducing belts: the usual hokum, which he purchased for her willingly. “I feel good about this one, David,” she said. “I think this will do the trick.” Then she handed him the 800-number and left the room to avoid his expression. A package arrived in seven to ten business days.

With the machines, assembly was often required. And ultimately, David was called into the living room to Alice’s rescue, where she’d be sitting in the middle of a pile of locking screws, bolts, boards, wheels, and wrapped pieces of metal, the parts numbered and lettered (5Q, F9) spread in a circle around her as if she were ground zero, all of which David spent the next few hours collecting and recombining.

From this chaos there emerged a contraption, a Frankensteinian engine, oddly insectlike, exoskeletal, that always included a seat of some kind and to which Alice attached her hands, hips, or bound her feet; hung upside down from or spun around in; the machine, as she pumped, pressed, or pedaled, threatening to evolve from exercise station to transportation and inevitably shaking itself apart, the whole process reminding David of old films of crazy planes and whirlybirds—the ones before the Wright brothers—that fell from cliffs, ramps, or towers, or simply exploded with the effort to fly.

The cardiovascular eliminated, Alice paid meticulous attention to her diet. She cut out snacks, carbs, and empty calories and was generally miserable, but she lost weight quickly. Because of her size, she shed her first ten pounds within two weeks. She became preoccupied, obsessed, and gave David regular reports. She knew the time, to the minute, of her bowel movements. Assessing their curly and oblong heft, she could guess their approximate weight. At work, she walked the stairs instead of riding the elevator, took soy milk instead of cream in her coffee. She ate the apples, after checking them for razors, that her delinquent and schizophrenic students left on her desk. Her sex drive disappeared; she refused to be touched,
and when she asked David what he thought of her progress—two months in, twenty-three pounds lost—he answered her encouragingly, because the change in her body was before-and-after dramatic. With glee, she pulled her pants away from her waist and punched extra holes in her belts. She felt thin, she said. But David was secretly pessimistic; in fact, he was certain she would fail. In one of their closets were boxes of her winter clothes, and around the same time every fall she had David bring them down from the top shelves.

“All of them?” he asked from the stepladder.

“Of course all of them,” she answered from below. The dresses were from thinner days, outdated—Alice’s fashions were cyclical—and in the mornings, she modeled for him while he ate his breakfast, doing quick little turns on the tile.

“Isn’t this dress funny?” she said, pinching the cloth in her fingers, pulling the skirt out wide and triangular, spreading the fabric like a pair of wings. David couldn’t help but laugh, a chuckle Alice thought was of joy, and she came over to him, took his head in her hands, clutching his hair and pressing his face into her chest. “This is it,” she whispered. “This is the one.” He looked up. She pulled his face toward hers and kissed him, then walked out the door, chin up and shoulders back—Alice gaining altitude, he thought, as she dropped ballast, a confidence in her stride that gave him a shiver of fear.

Is this it? David wondered. Is this the one?

Maybe, he thought, but most likely no. On certain afternoons, she was low. It was December, she was three months in, nearly thirty pounds gone, and the whole project seemed endless to her—impossible. She questioned her resolve. She would never drop the weight. The past week and a half, she’d lost only three pounds. Once—all right, twice—she’d cheated. (Going to work, she’d caved and stopped in McDonald’s for two Egg McMuffin meals. Yesterday, when David surprised her in the kitchen, she whirled round with her face covered in powdered sugar, an uneaten donut in each hand.) She called David at the office, pulling him from the daily playtest of their new game Escher X—short for Escher Exit. It was a work of programming and conceptual brilliance. The environments were based on famous Escher prints—
Relativity, Belvedere, Ascending and Descending
, to name a few—and the challenge of the game was to guide your avatar (the white humanoid from
Encounter)
through each inescapable level, each round-and-round realm, until you found the secret means of escape, the button or tile that uncoiled the environments’ Mobius strip. Though perhaps its best effect (this was on especially wonderful display in the
Relativity
level) was its replication, while you played, of the experience of looking at one of the prints themselves, of ascending a set of stairs to suddenly find yourself going down, to enter a room where someone was sitting on the ceiling, the ceiling becoming the floor, the waterfall falling up. And there were battles, of course, with all sorts of Escher monsters: the human-headed bird from
Another World II
, the alligators from
Reptiles
, the dragon from
Dragon
, the predator fish from
Predestination
. These exchanges upped your skill level with each victory and conferred more weapons on your avatar until you were strong enough for the final confrontation with your double—the stooped black humanoid who ruled the entire realm. His name, appropriately, was Mobius.

The game was beautiful. But it was also full of bugs, and they’d blown their projected release date. When David answered the phone, he was curt at first, but Alice sounded desperate.

“David,” she said, “do you love me?”

“Of course I love you.”

“Even if I’m like this?”

He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window. “Even if you’re like what?”

“You’re sweet,” Alice said.

David was silent.

“Because I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

“Don’t think you can do what?”

“It.
Die
-it. What do you
think?”

“Alice … ”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why don’t you think you can do it?”

“Because it takes so long.”

“That’s right.”

“Because it goes so slowly.”

“Because you’re in the middle.”

“Am I in the middle?” she said.

“We’ve talked about the middle.”

“Tell me again about the middle.”

“The middle is long and hard.”

“I’m stuck in the middle of trying to lose my middle.” She laughed, then began to weep.

“I’m in the middle too,” he said.

“Are you?”

“Of my game.” Of my book, he thought. “But that’s the thing about the
middle. It’s like holding your breath longer than you think you can. It’s the point before you black out, right before you surface. The last stretch uphill—the highest part—right before going down. Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“You’re not stuck. You’re moving. But you can’t see it.
I
can see it.”

“Oh, David, I want a burrito. I want a chimichanga with extra cheese.”

“But you’re going to hold out.”

“I am?”

“You’re going to resist.”

“I
am.”

“You can do this.”

These conversations bolstered her. Her determination was renewed. Home from school, she went on long walks uptown, to Central Park, up to the reservoir and around the cinder track and back. This gave David precious time alone. He returned to his book, retrieving the box from underneath his desk and pulling out the new pages he’d written. He needed a change of scenery, so he moved to the kitchen table, set out his laptop, and sat down. He felt clear-minded. Focused. Everything was in order. It had seemed like years since he’d had enough peace to write.

This is what it would be like, David thought, if Alice were gone.

“Hello?” She came into the kitchen and kissed him. Her face was flushed, her cheeks cold and slightly wet. Winter seemed to trail behind her. “I’m going to do it this time. I really am. And it’s because of you.”

She stood there, smiling. Saw the makeshift desk.

“Were you working?”

David twirled his pen in his fingers. “I was just finishing up.”

She packed her own bag lunch in the evenings, creasing the foil of her sandwich as neatly as a present and taping it closed. She stapled the paper bag and wrote
MY LUNCH
in black felt pen on the front, then placed it lovingly in the fridge. The whole pantry was marked in this fashion:
MY CRACKERS, MY PEACHES, MY TUNA.
She set out her breakfast the night before as well, her spoon, knife, and napkin arranged and ready for use, the cereal bowl turned upside down and her banana curved below it like a wide smile. It was a lonely little scene, David thought, staring at the place setting in the refrigerator’s light and secretly drinking her vanilla soy milk (
MY SOY MILK
she wrote on masking tape), her box of cereal (
MY CEREAL
) next to the measuring cup, its pictured athlete—receiver, hurdler, basketball player—frozen in leaps or bounds.

“I’m ready for sleep,” Alice told him.

She’d crawled under the covers and then she reached beneath her, strapped the sleep apnea mask to her face, and lay on her back staring blankly, eyes fixed on the image of her next meal. Look at how it comforts her, David thought, the calories counted like so many sheep.

She dropped off the moment he turned out the light.

While she slept, she exhaled musically, a cheerful, childlike hum. The machine whirred pleasantly. Not ready for the darkness or sleep, David lay there thinking about Escher X, his novel, and her accidental death. But then he listened to Alice breathe. And as he listened he experienced the most intense feeling of sympathy for her, a compassion that seemed to require her inertness, her unconsciousness. There was a whole world of torture she had to live through every day. He remembered a fat girl he’d gone to grade school with, how mercilessly he and all the other children had teased her—
Bobbie Jo’s a hippo, Bobbie Jo’s a cow, Bobbie Jo’s a bullfrog, Bobbie Jo’s a sow
. He still knew the song. Of course, Alice’s own students tormented her as well, David imagined. They were delinquents, criminals, loonies; they had no sense. He boiled with rage against them, though she’d never mentioned a single instance of abuse. He’d heard a young couple talking about Alice once in Central Park. “Look at her,” the man said to his girlfriend as David, having gone off to get Alice a Dove bar, came up behind them. “I mean, how do let yourself
get
like that?” The woman was wearing a spandex suit and Rollerblades. With her bright helmet, protective pads, and athletic body, she looked like a superhero. “I think you’d have to kill me,” she said. “Promise me you will?” He’d kill her, he promised, with his elephant gun. “You’re terrible,” the girl said, laughing and gliding off. You
are
terrible, David thought.
I’m
terrible—because he’d laughed too. He remembered the wakes of silence he and Alice trailed behind them as they walked across Sheep Meadow, conversations interrupted, looks both he and she knew were for her. She’d walk straight ahead, tucking her hair quickly behind her ear. At parties, when they were introduced to strangers, he watched them pretend she was unexceptional. Whenever possible, he stood next to her—he was a large man himself, stocky, over six feet tall—to dampen her effect.