Mr. Peanut (49 page)

She stepped into the beam the fixture cast. She stopped when she got close. “What happened to you?” she said.

He couldn’t speak at the sight of her. It had been over nine months since she’d disappeared. She looked radiant, tan. She’d colored her hair ash-blond, or the sun had. She’d lost, he guessed, over a hundred pounds.

“I changed,” he finally said.

“Clearly.”

“You changed too.”

She held her arms out, then let them fall. “You had that surgery,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, pulling up her blouse. There was a long pink scar, the pink of seashell, across her stomach.

“Will you stay here?” he said.

“For a while. Until you’re finished.”

“I understand,” he said. “I’d like that.”

She came over to him and put her arm around his neck, her palm on his bald scalp. She looked over his shoulder at the pages he was working on, then flipped through all those he’d written thus far. “You’re almost done,” she said.

“Almost to the end.”

“Are you coming to bed soon?”

“Yes.”

She kissed his forehead. “Good.”

This close to her, he could smell her scent of the sea.

A
nd then one day, David wrote, Alice began to lose weight.

He’d seen her drop pounds before, but perhaps because of her failed attempts in the past, her progress seemed more remarkable this time; or perhaps because they’d been apart for nine months it all seemed new, but never had he witnessed the kind of transformation she was undergoing now. Every morning there seemed less of her, a thinness visible in the cheekbones, a concavity in the belly, and a deflation of ass that Alice herself remarked on in the mirror with the indifference of a magician who knew the secret to her trick.

She talked to his reflection as he lay there in bed. “You look surprised,” she said.

“I am,” he said.

“I am too.” She turned her body to face him but kept her face to the mirror, looking at her back.

He stared at the crescent scar across her belly. “You’re doing beautifully,” he said.

“There’s still a ways to go.”

It was true. Although her weight loss bordered on the frantic and he was afraid to blink lest he miss some new aspect of this werewolf-to-wife transformation, there were aftershocks and wreckage, places on her body so stretched out—her triceps hanging from her arms like the edges of spun pizza dough, a roll around her waist like a sweater’s ends bunched belly to back—that no amount of exercise could tone, smooth, or retract. Only surgery could fix this. They’d have to flense her like the blubber from a whale.

“My skin,” she said wonderingly, “is like a space suit that’s too big.” She couldn’t leave the mirror, turning from side to side as if her nakedness were a new dress. “And yet it’s the oddest thing,” she said. “I feel like I’m not dieting anymore. If the doctors could just remove all my skin, they’d find me. Do you get it?”

“I do,” he said.

“It didn’t used to be like that.”

Suddenly he found himself very emotional.

She was still Alice, this Alice-not-Alice. Her smile was the same, her little
tics were yet in full effect, but there was a corresponding secretly won confidence that came somehow with her lightness, her nine-month odyssey, and made her seem miraculous, a mystery—not to be solved, mind you, just loved. He could wait to hear all the details.

She turned to look at him now, tucked her hair behind her ears, and came toward him on the bed, crawling on all fours to where she could kiss him, which she did. “I’ll weigh myself and then I want you to take a picture of me. And then you write.”

The emotions Pepin had kept quelled rose to the surface. “I don’t want to write,” he said.

Alice took his chin in her hand, raised his eyes to hers, and ran her free palm over his scalp. His head was several thousand periods of stubble. “Finish,” she said. “You’re almost done.”

She went to the bathroom to weigh herself, her hair covering her face as she stared at the scale’s readout—“One eighty-eight,” she said. Then she put on a dress, tied a ponytail, and went to the kitchen, with Pepin in tow. She stood by the refrigerator, smiling as he snapped the shot, Pepin shaking out the square of film the Polaroid camera tongued from its housing, the slow emergence of the image from white to yellow to the mood-ring shades of blues and greens so much more satisfying than anything digital or instantaneous, until finally, as if in reward for the wait, there was this new Alice, whom the two of them admired together, her face awash with the flash. Rolling a piece of tape into a loop, she stuck it on the back, which she stuck in turn in the upper left half of the refrigerator’s door.

“I’ll be back,” she said; then she left for the day.

Alone again, David wrote with the same quiet, bullet-train speed he’d been composing with since he’d arrived at the novel’s apex, a summit crossed in blackest night. He didn’t know how much he had left, exactly, though he had a clear sense of the movements required, of the book’s final shape. En route to the conclusion it split into a series of penultimates, all of them viable, only one of them definitive, circling back finally to the beginning, just as the book’s form demanded. As for the end itself, all he knew for sure was that he was getting there quickly.

She was waiting with Chinese for dinner after he returned from his run. Eating with Alice now was something that required an adjustment. Her portions were positively Lilliputian, measured out in thimblefuls. Course
to course, he had to eat fast in order to keep up. In contrast to his bowl of wonton soup (with two dumplings) she poured herself a ramekin (with half a dumpling) that she might as well have drunk like a shot. On his plate he piled lo mein, lemon chicken, beef with broccoli, and white rice—she was back and he was hungry again, so why not?—whereas on a saucer she fit a miniature version of the same. To call hers dinner would be a misnomer, since with her new, peanut-sized stomach she daily ate nine of these minimeals. Yet like Alice herself, with each day the portions seemed to shrink in size. Meanwhile, Pepin gorged.

“The more I disappear, the less I eat. Maybe soon I won’t eat at all.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You shower,” she said, “while I clean up.”

“Then?”

“Then
we go to bed.”

Admittedly, the prospect frightened him. He stood in the shower, arms crossed, waiting. It had been so long since he and Alice had made love that he was afraid he wouldn’t know how; or, worse, that she’d feel no desire for him, which fear reminded him of the months following her miscarriages when even an attempt to hold her in the night made her moan in pain and his only choice was to withdraw every extremity—stomach to cock, head to toe to soul—until he was contracted in a carapace of solitude, his heart hulled in and indefinitely encased, when he didn’t have to imagine touching her at all. He was also afraid that when she tried to kiss him he might recoil.

Once he was out of the shower, a towel around his neck and another hooked at his waist, she took him by the hand, pulled him toward the bed, and sat down. When he gave a slight tug against her weight, like a fish’s sampling of bait, she stood up, took one end of the towel around his neck, and slid it off. The little hairs sprouting all over his chest were like the bristles on a fly. She pulled away the towel at his waist. He stood limp, relaxed, though when she leaned closer he tensed to be tickled, to fall fetal, thinking he might burst into tears. He closed his eyes so tightly that the muscles felt taut in his cheeks. He heard Alice step out of her dress, her bra unsnap, her panties hiss down her thighs, and then she kissed him. He had to consciously relax his lips and mouth, to suppress the powerful urge to snap-jaw her tongue.

She, in turn, persisted gently, feeding quietly and calmly, like a cat lapping water from a bowl. “Kiss me,” she whispered.

They kissed, and it was like a watching a sand castle washed over by
a wave: merlons of the parapets melted to crenels, turrets toppled and gun slits collapsed, the ramparts sliding into the sea.

“Alice, I missed you so.”

They lay together later, staring up at the ceiling and holding hands.

“How did you get to the end?” she said.

He wrote about the beginning.

They met in a film class, Marriage and Hitchcock.

It was all purely chance. His master’s in computer science required that David take a couple of liberal arts classes—he’d put it off—and in his last semester this was one of only three courses with openings; another was called Feminism and Schizophrenia in the Fifties, and the other, a seminar in the works of Italo Calvino, meant nothing to him, though the graduate student at the registration desk raved about the author and jotted down a list of his books. Somehow, David had never seen a single Hitchcock film. He was fluent in the famous images from specials and tributes on TV and montages on the Academy Awards—the woman being attacked in the phone booth by seagulls in
The Birds
, Jimmy Stewart lowering the telephoto lens from his eye in
Rear Window
, Janet Leigh getting stabbed to death in the shower in
Psycho
—but knew none of the stories. He’d missed a whole era, and suddenly it felt like a terrible gap. Given the course requirements, it also seemed like a breeze: one term paper and regular attendance for screenings and discussions. Watching movies and talking about them, he thought, wasn’t education, just recreation. Yet these films would change how he saw everything, just as seeing Alice for the first time would change his life.

The class was held in a large amphitheater divided into three blocks of seating by four flights of stairs, and he, preferring the back rows, chose the farthest seat right in the middle. Attended by undergraduates, mostly, the class was nearly two-thirds full, many ambling in several minutes late, and the professor was late as well. David pulled the Calvino book he was reading,
Invisible Cities
, from his bag. Engrossed by its simple complexity, and the notion that it would make an unbelievable video game, he was considering whether to transfer to the other class when he saw Alice walking down the steps to his left.

He couldn’t move. Even from this distance, it was her hair that arrested him. Growing down to the small of her back, it had a particular equine luster and silkiness that caught light at the crown and made him understand immediately the pleasure of grooming horses and why girls sat before mirrors
meditatively brushing their hair at bedtime. He wished he could’ve been her father and had years of such a delicious sight. She was tall and big-boned, so full-chested and softball-player solid that she made the coeds surrounding her seem like mere girls. Carrying a spiral notebook with a pen quivered in the loops—her light load suggesting an economy, a practicality, he liked immediately—she took each step exaggeratedly, plunking her feet down as if she were amusing herself. He also couldn’t help noticing she was alone. She cleared the hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear, then turned to him. That nothing indicated she’d registered his presence, though he was obviously staring, made her seem an even cooler customer. There was cream in the hazel of her eyes, a near-gray that made them appear almost wolfish.

This could be the worst class he’d ever take, he thought, but he wouldn’t miss a single session. She took a seat three rows back from the front, one section to his left. She pulled her pen from the spiral ring and began chewing its end languidly, like a dog its beloved toy. David, meanwhile, had shifted to a pointer’s stiffness himself, on high alert, gripping the edge of his flip-down desk.

The professor—Dr. Otto—came rushing in. He was rangy and soft-spoken, his voice so low that David almost moved closer. Otto had a shock of white hair and a discreet pooch of a stomach that, despite his height and his long Giacometti stride, made him seem delicate. His square glasses rested on a large, pendulous nose. He seemed harried, flustered by his own lateness, but stopped dead for a second, pulled the projector’s remote from his pants, held it up, and said, “Ah,” then pointed his other index finger in the air.

“Little-known fact about the films of Alfred Hitchcock,” he said, and everyone went silent, the type-A kids holding their pens poised above their notebooks. “There’s a chicken in every one of them.” Several students looked at one another, perplexed. A knowing cluster of grad students to David’s left guffawed. “Yes,” he said, “a chicken. This was my discovery, and I’m not yet famous for it, but I will be once my book is complete.” His soft laugh was almost like a pant. “This I call the Chicken Theory of Cinema. In French,
Le Poulet Subtil
. There is in every movie—not just the work of Hitchcock but every movie ever made—either a literal chicken or what I’ve come to call the Subtle Chicken. Now, I know what your next question is going to be: What’s the Subtle Chicken? Well, I’ll tell you. It may be a figurative chicken. Or a psychological condition. It might even be an egg. I noticed a close-up of an egg frying in
Moonstruck
this weekend. Aha, I thought, Subtle Chicken. Not to mention that the characters in the film are
all afraid of love or death.” He pointed the remote at the projector and partly dimmed the lights. “Of course, your next question is why? Why, Dr. Otto, is there a chicken in every movie? Well, I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Why should I give you the punch line of my life’s work?” He dimmed the lights further. “Of course one problem with my theory is that while it covers the entire history of cinema, I’ve yet to see every movie ever made. And they make new ones
all the time
. I’ll never finish!” He laughed again, a wet laugh, Grover-ish, mixed liberally with saliva. The class laughed too as he wiped his mouth, but David could barely bring himself to breathe. “Let’s start, shall we? Oh, wait,” Otto said, “I have to take roll.”

He called her name, finally: Alice Reese.

Then he killed the lights. But before it was dark, Alice turned in her chair, pen still in her mouth and notebook not yet open, and looked up at David. If she was waiting for him to smile, he couldn’t; he was too shocked even to blink.