Mr. Peanut (48 page)

“Alice and I, we’re not … finished.”

Mobius squinted.

“You’ll probably think this is strange,” David said.

“I one hundred percent doubt it.”

“Let’s just say I’m writing a book.”

Mobius leaned back, pressing his tongue into his cheek and nodding slowly. “I see. Is it autobiographical?”

“Sort of.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a man who may or may not have killed his wife.”

Mobius smiled. “Uh-huh.”

“But I’m stuck.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t
know
what happens next.”

“You need an
editor.”

“It’s more like a plot.”

Mobius pointed his finger at David and chuckled. “Oh, that’s good.”

“Is it?”

“You want to
find
her,” Mobius said, “because you want to get to the
end
.”

David was amazed. “Exactly.”

“So if I find her, should I … ”

David waited.

“ … finish?”

“What?”

Now it was Mobius who paused. “The
book,”
he said finally.

“Oh,” David said. “I
see.”
His mind drifting, he shook his head sadly. “Sometimes I think I don’t want to know how it ends.”

“It’s usually better that way,” Mobius said.

David looked at him. He’d never seen eyes so black, a mouth so big. This had been a mistake. This wasn’t the solution. But it was new, and new was good.

“But just out of curiosity,” he said, “how much … ?”

With his index finger, Mobius wrote a figure in the air: an eight and five zeroes. He shrugged. “Give or take.”

“I
see,”
David said. “And how do I … ?”

“Over time. With my other clients, I’ve found it’s best for them to set a little aside every day. No lump-sum withdrawals showing up in your bank statements. No paper trail. I tell them to treat our arrangement as a 401(k). As a
retirement
account.”

David dreamed powerfully for a moment.

“Again, I’m just curious,” he said. “How would you … ?

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mobius said, smiling like an actor talking humbly about past performances. “I never know how it’ll play out. I need to learn about the mark first, her schedule, her habits. That’s where the artistry comes in, the discipline. Readiness is
all
. But personally I’m partial to convenient acts of God.”

The two men stared at each other.

“I’m probably not interested,” David said.

“I understand. It’s not a fine art.”

“What isn’t?”

“Finishing,” Mobius said.

David watched him polish off the rest of his pasta. Once he was done, Mobius drank the remainder of his wine in one gulp, touched the edges of his mouth with his napkin, balled it up, and threw it on his plate, where it bloomed with the remaining sauce. Then he pushed the check toward David.

“I enjoyed our talk,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.” He hopped off his briefcase, snatched it up, and turned to go.

“Wait,” David said. “Did you and I just agree to something?”

“No,” Mobius said. “We haven’t agreed to a thing.”

•    •    •

Later, walking home in a daze, David felt like he’d been mugged—like something so unexpected and violent had happened that the experience had passed through him before he’d had the chance to react. Though now he felt a cold shiver run through his body, an effect, he decided, not only of being so close to someone so evil but also believing in their evil—enough, that is, to throw open the doors of his marriage. And as he went over their conversation again, he was suddenly terribly and awfully ashamed, both for what he’d told Mobius and what he hadn’t said.

First he’d omitted his own affair. And it wasn’t that the affair itself was important—which wasn’t to say that it wasn’t—but rather that in response to whatever Alice was struggling with, whatever had caused her to withdraw from him, he had chosen the arms of another woman instead of relying on his own fortitude, as if he’d somehow deserved more comfort than Alice herself had been able to give, or not. Which was part of marriage, after all, part of the vows: enduring those times. And this sense of entitlement seemed to him an even greater sin than infidelity.

He’d omitted that on some deep level he wished she’d remained fat, because part of him—a small, black, and ugly little part—knew that it made her grateful for as little or as much as he found it convenient to give. And once he’d recognized this, he’d in turn always feared that she would then somehow recognize her own beauty. And so long as she didn’t, no one else could recognize it either. And so long as no one ever did, including Alice herself, then she’d never have the confidence to leave him. He’d always be the center of her world—the only person she’d think loved her and thus all she’d ever know of love. She would stay forever. And realizing this, David’s wish seemed to him akin to some horrible, voracious appetite.

Finally and most awfully he’d omitted that in dark moments he thought Alice had gained the weight because of him, because of something heavy in his character that had infected her; didn’t the experts talk about obesity as a disease? And at these times he felt the best, most generous and altruistic thing he could do for her was to leave, to end them, since in some sense he didn’t understand it was their marriage that was making her sick. But he never did. And that he could see this truth without acting on it made him hate himself and love Alice all the more for caring for him at all.

He ran down the street, breaking into a full sprint. He wanted to put as much distance between him and Mobius as he could, but also to feel his heart beat, to drive himself until he was so winded he’d have to stop. He whipped past people, pumping his arms, a whistling in his ears. He wanted to run
home but was out of shape and only managed to cover a couple of blocks. He clutched a parking meter while he sucked air. His legs burned; his chest felt splashed by acid. How long had it been since he’d exerted himself like this? He felt as if his skin were a too-thick suit he was eternally condemned to wear. He wanted to be free of it, to be light, to rip his body off like a shirt.

And he wanted Alice back, not to show her that he was worthy but to confess that he knew nothing of her at all. Or more accurately, to admit how little, really, he knew even after all this time. It was enough to bring a person to his knees in humility. It was the beginning but also the end: the necessary conclusion of Alice’s experiment.

“Please,” he said, leaning against the meter. “Come back to me.”

In the lobby, he noticed their mailbox was full.

When he opened it, he saw a large manila envelope, 8½ × 11, addressed to him in Alice’s hand. It had been postmarked only yesterday and was sent from New York City. In spite of his excitement, David opened it carefully. Several things fell out: a set of plane tickets and then a small envelope, his name written in her hand as well. The note was less than a page long, and he read it through quickly.

He didn’t understand.

He looked at the plane tickets, reread the note from Alice, then dropped all the other mail so he could hold the page in both of his hands. He sank to the floor and read the letter again, his expression going sour with tears. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, no.” He read Alice’s letter once more—in his mind hearing her voice reading the words aloud—and when he’d finished, he screamed like he’d run earlier. He screamed all the air from his lungs. Then, when he got his breath back, he screamed some more.

David spent the next three days in bed.

He called Cady and told him he was taking an indefinite sabbatical but would sell him his shares in Spellbound if he wished, and after hanging up he ripped the cord from the wall with a single pull.

For three days, he lay in his bed in their destroyed apartment. He drew the blinds and had only the vaguest sense of night and day. He left his bed only to piss and shit and drink water from the tap, then crawled back under the covers and went to sleep or lay awake for hours with all the lights off, dreaming in either state. He ignored the pain of hunger long enough until he felt a pleasant, cleansing emptiness that seemed to engender even more powerful dreaming—and there were times he imagined he might never eat again. He often woke with a start, unsure of where he was,
and when he remembered he began to sob again, repeating this cycle until he felt nothing, until he was as empty of grief as he was of sustenance. He could feel his stomach shrinking with each day. It was like the opposite of pregnancy, and he wondered at one point if his stomach might pucker so much with hunger that he might not be able to eat again. Then he slept some more.

On the third day he woke up, got out of bed, and opened the shades. He didn’t know what day it was but he knew what he had to do. He’d thought that if he found Alice he’d know what happened next; and now that he knew, he understood that there was some work to accomplish before he got to the end.

He was weakened from his fast and walked gingerly to the bathroom and bathed like a man returned from an exile in the desert for months. He drank water from the shower head. He shaved and washed his hair, and after staring at his razor for a minute or more he decided to shave all the hair from his body, which took a very long time. Once out of the shower, he brushed his teeth and then went to the kitchen for a pair of scissors and cut off his thick locks of hair. And then, back in front of the mirror, he lathered his scalp and shaved that as well.

He put on jeans—slightly loose at the waist—and a T-shirt and set to work cleaning the apartment. Chaos is a far faster spirit than order, and it took him triple the time to restore their home. He put Alice’s clothes back into the boxes and sealed them, but before putting them back in the closet he reorganized the closet itself, refolding her sweaters and blouses and correctly matching her shoes. He put her papers back in the file cabinet but before returning them he culled every unnecessary page and bill and piece of useless correspondence until the files themselves shrank to half the width they’d been before. He gathered all of the detritus from their bedside tables, separating the dead pens from those that could still write and throwing out the others, separating out the pennies and nickels and quarters and dimes each into their own bottles. He threw out old phone books. He tore scribbled pages from legal pads until he arrived at sheets blank but for the indentations of what had been written on them before. In short, he purged their apartment of their lives’ clutter, and it felt roomier, shipshape, arranged. He even crammed the stuffing back into the mattress and sewed the torn gash closed. And before he put the mattress back on the box spring, he returned Alice’s journal to where he’d found it, knowing he’d sleep better with it there.

He had a look at himself in the mirror. He looked like a newborn. His shaved skin felt unbelievably soft.

Then he sat down at the table with his manuscript and began to write. Immediately he got beyond the place where he’d been blocked and into whole new territories, with a speed of which he’d only dreamed. He wrote for so long that his eyes and fingers hurt, so automatically it was as if another voice spoke through him, and when exhausted after many hours of this he rested his bald head on the table.

Days passed. Weeks. He fell into a routine. He woke up and put on the coffee and showered while it was brewing. He was always sure to have everything on the dining table arranged the night before—manuscript, pens, notepad, laptop. He ate something light before starting, maybe an egg or some fruit or toast with cheese, then wrote for several hours, three or four, usually, the freshest of the day, though he could go as long as five—the iteration a blink, a devolution or evolution to an animal’s sense of time, which is to say he had no sense of it at all. He was given to reading aloud, to shouting his words without inflection to feel the pressure and hear the meter of his sentences. Or he spoke sometimes
as
he wrote, quietly. He ate again, standing at the kitchen counter more often than not. He went for a walk in the park afterward but didn’t see a thing. He made a new pot of coffee, though he wasn’t beyond reheating what was left in the carafe. The second session could be wonderful, a gift. Mental exhaustion could free him up, bring him closer to dreaming, or it could be a complete wash, setting the hair he didn’t have aflame. By the end of the day he was ready for a run. He changed, went to the park again, ran round the cinder track and back. Blood speeding through his veins, flooding his brain, could be hallucinogenic, triggering an associative storm. He made notes as soon as he returned, then did push-ups and sit-ups. He bought himself a pull-up bar, adding an extra rep or two a day. He grew stronger, thinner, leaner, his carb face disappearing, though in the mirror it wasn’t him he saw. Alice was right: the skin could be a chrysalis; underneath was someone new. He showered, changed, poured himself some wine, drinking while he made dinner, though it was an act of will to cook for one. Having given everything to the day, he was now spent, utterly, on night’s shore, in bliss shelled in by regret. And the next day he started over.

Once, in the hallway, he stopped before his favorite Escher,
Encounter
, the picture in which the little men—one black, the other white—come around from the background, from a conjoined, two-dimensional tessellation, to meet as separate entities in the foreground above the surface of the plane. He saw his reflection in the glass, and when he focused on it the picture disappeared; and then it returned to view.

It was all becoming clearer now.

•    •    •

Weeks passed this way, his solitude uninterrupted, summer having arrived, June now, and then one night, after working all day with such concentration he’d forgotten to eat, he raised his head to the sound of keys at the door. Surprisingly, he neither started nor got up from his chair. The door swung closed, and he heard the sound of shoes on the hardwood.

“Hello?” the voice said.

It was Alice.

Pepin sat there until she found him. But for the light shining from above the table, all the lights were off in the apartment.