Mr. Peanut (47 page)

He had to finish the book and be done with it. Be done with it, and a whole new world would open before him: the world without his book.

He had to finish it but didn’t know how to. He didn’t know what happened next. And the only way of knowing this was to have it happen.

Perplexed, he got up from his chair and went to the cupboard and got down a can of peanuts from his secret stash of forbidden foods. He poured out a handful and ate them and then wiped the salt from his empty hand on his pants. He looked at the chipper Planters Peanuts man tipping his top hat hello and thought about how one bite could kill Alice dead.

Of course! David thought.

But now he had to find her!

No denying it, his wife was a smart woman, but he didn’t think she could disappear without a trace. Yet, after a search through her desk and the discovery of her laptop (hard drive erased), it seemed she’d done just that.

Convinced there must be a clue in the apartment, he began to turn the place over. Not sure what he was looking for, he started in her closet. From the top shelves he brought down all the boxes of her old clothes and rifled
through them, occasionally taking breaks to sniff the fabric that still smelled of Alice, remembering her wearing a particular outfit, the countless mornings before she left for work when she modeled one, after she’d stamped her foot to get his attention, so that he could take in her whole frame, and said, “How does this look?” as if she needed him to see her in order for her to see herself. He searched through her piles of sweaters and T-shirts and multitiered shelves of shoes, Alice preferring pumps to heels, David thinking of her feet, fat long before she was, not a bone visible in them, and her ankles fat too. “I have my father’s feet,” she used to say woefully. “If we have girls, I hope they get yours.” He mulled over old photos of her family and of Alice as a child, two-by-three-inch prints, the dates printed in the border, their color washed out with time, the pixilation pitiful compared to cameras today, a focus that seemed Seurat-soft, the focus of dreams, of memory, David realizing, sadly, how few stories of her childhood he knew or, even more sadly, how few happy stories of her childhood she had. In one, age five, perhaps, in polo shirt and jeans, her chestnut hair so short she looked like a little boy, she was by the lake with her golden retriever, famous in her mind and special in her heart for saving her whenever she climbed the picket fence in her backyard, Princess leaping over it to trot after her, take her wrist in her own soft mouth, and lead her back home, and who, because she barked so much (not allowed inside the house), was one day sent away, as Alice would be later, by her father. David found old photos of Alice and himself that he’d forgotten, and he could see in their expressions that they’d once been happy; and in their appearance then, the difference in their age now was visible in the smoothness of their skin, in the size of faces, waistlines, the lack of double chins, as if marriage itself were a fattening before the slaughter. He found file folders of letters they’d written to each other, a form of communication as dead as the dinosaur, as film in cameras, David tickled by their banality, by Alice’s girly-girl print, an innocence in the very morphology of the letters themselves: the harmless roundness of her little
b
’s and
d
’s, a sweetness in the disproportionate contours of her
a
’s and
g
’s.
O’s
like those wouldn’t hurt anyone, he reflected, and
z’
s like Alice’s aimed to please. She was a good woman, a loving wife, and he needed to track her down to find out what happened next, so he kept tearing through the place. He took down tins she’d marked
XMAS
, the strings of lights tangled no matter how carefully she’d spooled them the year before, the cords that came out of storage as coiled as snakes in a den. And boxes marked
DECORATIONS
, with at least one ornament in each mysteriously shattered, no matter how delicately it had been put away; even untouched things could break. He dumped out
her personal files from file cabinets: job applications and professional correspondence and old papers she’d written in college that he read now with interest, page after page revealing the shape of her mind but leaving no tracks to wherever she was now. He looked through legal pads stuffed between phone books in their kitchen cabinets, tried to decode notes she’d scrawled between messages left for him, numbers without names circled between age-old shopping lists and doodles and to-dos. He looked through her lesson plans but found no secret plans, pulled down books from her bookshelves and checked the margins of novels for notes that might provide hints, finding only observations too cryptic to decode or too general—
Yes!
she wrote, or
True!
—to be considered leads but that spurred him on to read the underlined passages themselves.
A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell
. Yes! David thought. True!

Until, at his wit’s end with so many dead ends, he began to tear the apartment down. He pulled the drawers from the bedside tables, kicked the furniture to kindling, then searched through the contents he’d poured into a pile: kite tails of condoms and spent tubes of K-Y jelly and berets and spools of thread and sewing needles
(sewing needles?)
and safety pins and pennies black with age or lichen green. In her bedroom dresser, in the very back of her top drawer, he discovered a cache of conditioners and creams from hotels, her favorite things to filch, a collection of combs, a brush webbed with her hair, dead pens, even love letters he was touched she’d saved in an envelope he’d once addressed to
ALICE
. (He read those as well.) He pulled out those drawers too, checked their bottoms and backs, then stacked them up, and with the dresser lightened now, within his strength to lift, he pulled it from the wall and heard something fall to the floor, the small jewelry box Alice thought she’d lost years ago, the diamond earrings he’d bought her (and replaced) still there, pinned in that limbo between furniture and wall. “Found it, Alice,” he said aloud. He looked under the bed and pulled the things they’d stacked there out from a moonscape of congealed dust beneath the place they slept: a mirror and a poster of Hitchcock’s
Rear Window
. Then all that was left to search was the bed itself. He removed the comforter and sheets to reveal the naked challah braids of the mattress’s skin. With a butcher knife from the kitchen and a power he didn’t realize he had, he hacked a gaping wound in its center, burying his arm up to the shoulder in the hole like a farmer helping a large animal give birth, feeling around its spring-and-foam guts for something he
knew
was here—but nothing was. That left only the box spring beneath. He went to the toolbox for a saw, prepared to dismantle the thing piece by piece if necessary;
and it was only after he’d lifted the disemboweled mattress and timbered it across the tornado-struck room that David stopped cold—for there, lying dead center, as if the box spring were a giant picture frame, he finally found what he didn’t realize he’d been looking for:

Her journal.

It was bound and black, the pages unlined, with a colored print on the cover of Botticelli’s Venus rising from the waves. He opened it to the first page, careful to check the date, and the only entry began a few days after Alice returned from the hospital:

FINISH

Oh, he needed to
find
her! He needed to find out what happened next. But he couldn’t find her on his own. He needed a professional.

Google “private investigator” and the hits came replete with as many pop-ups as porn sites, with joke names that made it hard to take these services seriously: Check Mate, Check-A-Mate and Investi-Mate; Cheater Beaters, Vowbusters, and Spouse-a-Louse. Just the number of hits alone, 7,494,000, was mind-boggling: a whole city’s or separate state’s worth of private eyes: Pvteyes, hidemseekm, and Sherlock; RUsure and Bsure.com, Divorce.net. He narrowed his search to New York, whittling the number of hits down to a million four, and baffled still how to choose between so many options, he clicked on the site whose name he liked the most:

He clicked, and once he entered the site, saw the only information on the page was a telephone number. After a few minutes of staring at the screen, he dialed—it was a pager—and punched in his number, then hung up.

Almost instantly, a man called back. “Can I help you?”

“I’m calling about my wife,” David said.

“Ah,” he said. “What did the bitch do?”

“She left me.”

“For another man?”

“I’m … I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“But you want to know so.”

“Yes,” he said. “I want to find her.”

Silence—for so long, in fact, that he thought they’d been disconnected. “Are you there?”

“I’ve gotta say,” the man said, “you don’t sound particularly upset.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t sound like someone who’s been betrayed.”

“I don’t know if I have been.”

“If you’re calling me, you don’t know anything.”

“What am I supposed to sound like?”

“Angry. You’re angry, aren’t you?”

“Extremely.”

“You feel deserted, don’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

“Like you’re capable of anything?”

“If she were here right now I’d wring her—”

“Don’t say it,” the man said. “Let’s meet right away.”

They agreed on a Greek-run diner nearby. Anxious to get out of his wrecked apartment, David left immediately, walking the few blocks as quickly as he could. The restaurant was nearly empty but he took a booth in the rear anyway, as far from the few patrons as possible, his back to the giant mural of the Acropolis. The waiter came over to take his order, and it was comforting how little Greek waiters had changed over the years. Still with the buttons of their white shirts unbuttoned and their mats of chest hair exposed, still with the gold chains—never less than one or more than three—from which dangled symbols that looked vaguely Hebrew, but, most of all, still with the complete indifference with which they took your order, that socialite’s over-your-shoulder look while you spoke, and then the dismissive rip from their dupe pad whether you’d asked for the right side of the menu or just a cup of tea. The waiter left, revealing another person standing behind him.

“Are you David?” the man said.

For a moment, David thought he’d been addressed by a boy. He stood light-switch high, his belt well below the tabletop, pictures of lobsters embroidered into his tie. Of indeterminate age—he could be thirty or fifty—he had black hair long in the back and bangs that half hid his eyes, black eyes that glinted brightly, like the pictures you see of the deepest deep-sea fish. Though diminutive he was still physically imposing, top-heavy, long-armed, and large-headed too, like a boxer or a pit bull, his
mouth so big that a bite from it could kill you. He was carrying a large briefcase that he put down on the floor next to the booth, and when he reached out his hand, David, so taken with his appearance, couldn’t help but smile.

“I’m Mr. Mobius,” he said.

They shook—and in a flash, David was pinned to the booth, his arm wrenched into a karate hold, his wrist bent back to breaking.

“Don’t move,” Mobius whispered. With his free hand, he patted David down, felt around his stomach and sides, behind his back and between his legs so close to his cock it made his penis tingle. With one of his feet he felt up David’s shins and calves, watching his eyes closely. Then he pulled David’s wallet from his breast pocket and flipped it open to his license, looking back and forth between picture and face as carefully as a golfer lines up a putt. “All right,” he said. “You’re clean.”

He let go of David’s hand.

“May I?” he said, indicating the table.

“Sure,” David said, shaking out his wrist.

The man placed his briefcase on the vinyl cushion, scooting down the booth with a side-to-side gait to hop up on the bag like a midget on a phone book. “Sorry to treat you so roughly,” he said, “but as you’ve learned, you can’t trust anybody these days.”

“No,” he said. “I guess you can’t.”

When the waiter reappeared, Mobius ordered linguine with clam sauce and a glass of white wine.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me
your
side of the story.”

Afterward, after David ordered some wine himself and told his story from the beginning to now, Mobius asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to find her.”

“When did you say she split?”

“Last September.”

“Nine months. That’s a pretty cold trail.”

“Are you saying you can’t do it?”

“I’m saying it could take time. It could cost you.”

“Money’s not an issue.”

“I understand,” Mobius said. “But do you mind if I ask you something?”

“All right.”

“Why
do
you want to find her?”

For a moment, David was baffled. “So I can … find out.”

“Find
what
out?”

“Where she is.”

Mobius looked back and forth for a moment. “I understand that. But it’s the motivation I don’t get. I mean, given what you’ve described to me. She didn’t take your money. She didn’t betray you. You’re … free.”

“What are you saying?”

“Why not just let her go?”

David was stunned. “I … I can’t just let her go.”

“Why not?”

David shook his head.

“Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the business, but I’ve had tens of customers who’d just … ”

“What?”

“Well, they’d just love to be where you are right now.” Mobius twirled the pasta on his fork using his spoon, then opened his rottweiler’s mouth and ate the whole tennis ball of spaghetti in one bite.

“I want to find her,” David said, “to find out what happens next.”

“Next?”