Mr. Peanut (53 page)

Knowing
. Finally he’d arrived, he felt, at his own core, at something nourishing that was contained within the shell of his own being. He finally knew who he was. He was a father. They were a family. Nothing could shake this knowledge.

At the moment, David was sitting on the living room floor with Grace. It was late morning, brilliant outside, and Alice walked over to the window and stared out. On the rug David had spread Grace’s little mat, which she loved. It had an illustration of a meadow with a stream running through it, pastures, and a picket fence too. There was a mirror in which she’d study her face, and on soft little structures velcroed to the mat, cows and sheep and chickens and horses would stare back out. Grace would look at herself in the mirror, then at the menagerie, and raise her arms and legs with her toes pointing toward the ceiling and her fingers spread out like a puppeteer’s, a position that made her look as if she were skydiving. She giggled happily, which made him laugh.

“What have you two been doing?” Alice said.

He looked up at her happily. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

Pepin woke, lying diagonally across their bed, and noticed when he sat up that he was naked. Alice had gone to work already, and the realization of
this and the lateness—it was almost eight o’clock—made him dizzy with fear. He sat up in bed, though his belly gave him pause and the flab between his thighs and breasts made it an exercise unto itself. This reminded him of Alice at her heaviest, when he’d wake just as she was stirring and feel her enormity behind him, her radiant heat, as if he’d gone to sleep with a bear, her outline exceeding his, and how her getting out of bed required a move similar to his sit-up now. She’d prop herself on her left elbow and throw one leg across the other and shoot her right arm out like a punch, both limbs flung over the bed’s edge. There was a moment of equilibrium when she looked like a martial artist frozen midkick, then a slight rock back followed by a push off with her left arm; and like a ship righting herself, she did too. She had to rest for a second, her palms on the mattress, her feet on the floor, her back to him. “One day I won’t make it,” she said. “I’ll just lie there stuck.” Her words were snorkeled by her sleep apnea mask, the tube bisecting her scalp and running through her hair like a long braid, the plastic opaque and the color of a shrimp’s shell, and when she turned to look at him he realized how much the mask’s filters looked like the nostrils of a hog; and he thought of their flight to Hawaii, when all the oxygen masks sprung from the ceiling and the passengers, securing them in the rumble and pitch, looked around wildly at one another. A plane of pigs, Pepin had thought. A passel of swine. Who knew you looked like this before you died?

This last thought now sent him scrambling to his computer. Mobius had said to keep away from him, and that was just the thing to do: take Alice and go
far
away, somewhere the little freak couldn’t follow them to, somewhere safe where she could get right, where
they
could, even if that meant halfway around the world. He had a conversation in his mind akin to the one he and Alice had before she’d disappeared, about the Great Barrier Reef, and it was a sign of his own narrow curiosities that he had no idea where in Australia this wonder might be. So he Googled away. It was in Queensland, off the continent’s northeast coast, and it was, he read in Wikipedia, the world’s biggest single structure made by living organisms, billions of tiny coral polyps, and it supported a wide diversity of life. A place teeming with life, Pepin thought, that could support
them!
That’s what
he
wanted: to be a part of life’s team! He was on Expedia in a flash, two tickets purchased for tonight out of JFK to Brisbane, a red-eye through LAX. The world had been made virtual, and if you had the means it was like a video game. You could pick anywhere on the globe, click a mouse, hit a few buttons, and you’d be there within hours.

He dressed, grabbed their passports, and left.

It was an against-the-flow commute up to the school where Alice taught,
and he drove like a madman up the West Side Highway, the Henry Hudson, and then the Saw Mill, though once in Hawthorne and on the campus itself he drove slowly, organizing his thoughts, his story, his pitch. It was a state-run school for disturbed and abused teens, its buildings fashioned of cinder block, the green and gray halls washed out with fluorescent light. Why had his wife been drawn to this place? Because these children needed endless mothering? Or because like her they were fundamentally stuck?

Ahead, in the parking lot, several school buses were loading up. He saw Alice ferrying kids inside, taking roll as the boys and girls stepped on board, but when she caught sight of him she froze, unsure what to make of his presence, and in this moment of stillness he considered her transformation utterly remarkable. She was so thin now—skinnier even than when they’d first met—and her cheeks so prominent it made her lips seem larger, fuller, her hair, still beautiful, framing her face. He would take this picture and add it to the dated Polaroids on their refrigerator door. Something about this new beauty, coupled with her depression, scared him as much as it warmed him. Like sickness, beauty could destabilize the beholder. Just two nights ago, after a fight in which he’d begged her to see her doctor immediately, he stood by her in the bathroom and handed her a glass of water. “I want to see you take these,” he said, holding up her medications. “Now open your mouth,” he’d said after she swallowed. “They’re not helping,” she said, crying. “They
will,”
he said, holding her until she freed herself and pushed past him to their bed. She cried there afterward for, by his watch, a remarkable two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Depression, with its endless reserves, was as voracious as her greatest appetites, and it tricked him every time into thinking he could love it out of her.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I need to talk with you.”

“I’m busy.”

“It’s important.”

“It has to be quick.”

Her eyes were red, already liquid, as if his very presence had lit a fuse in her. He could feel them both tensing for the blast. Finally, she handed her clipboard to another teacher and led him inside the building to her classroom.

“I want you to relax for a second,” he said. “Just hear me out. Last year you talked about us leaving. Walking away. Purpose without procedure. So I’m game now. I bought us tickets. You and me, tonight. Australia. We just go.”

Her arms were crossed. She looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about not even packing. I’m talking about going, right now, you and me, no questions asked.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, and turned to walk out.

He grabbed her arm, more angrily than he meant to. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

She looked at his hand. “You’re hurting me.”

“You don’t get to just let loose and not let me say something. I get to speak too.”

“Then speak.”

“Come with me. Right now.”

She waited until he let go. “You’re always late,” she said. “You know that?”

“Maybe I—”

“These things, these ideas, they come from me”—she stabbed her chest—“and never from you”—she stabbed his—“so when you finally come around, it makes me feel like you’re doing it out of pity.”

“That was probably right before but not anymore. This is
me
now.”

“And this is me saying no. I’m not just leaving with you, dropping everything to discover after a few weeks in the Outback or wherever that you don’t want to be there. I’m not going through
that
again.” She was crying now, trembling.

“Please,” he said. She looked up at him and seemed to soften for a moment. He gently took her arms. “You have to trust me here. We
have
to go.”

She shook her head. “The kids are waiting for me.”

She went out to the bus and he grabbed his hair in his fist and followed her without speaking and got into his car. Furious, he saw a cell phone sitting on the passenger seat. And then it rang.

“What are you doing?” Mobius said.

“Trying to keep her away from you.”

“You’ll get hurt.”

“We’ll see.”

“You know what you don’t realize?” Mobius said. “There are two moves you can make here, continue straight or swerve, and they both lead to the same thing. No matter what you do. In game theory it’s called Hawk-Dove. Also known as Chicken.”

“What about what Alice does?”

“I have an ace up my sleeve there.”

“What’s that?”

“The end.”

“Goddamn you,” Pepin said, “I don’t
want
the end.”

“Yes you do, but you won’t
do
it. That’s why I am.” He hung up.

Pepin screamed at the phone and shook it, then got out of the car and looked around as if he expected Mobius to be nearby, as if their phones were connected by string, he wasn’t sure why. Alice’s bus, followed by another, pulled out of the parking lot. The last remaining bus had almost finished boarding.

“Where’re you guys headed?” Pepin asked a student.

“The Museum of Natural History,” the kid said.

Alone now, Pepin wrote:

There are two of us, of course, David and Pepin, interlocked and separate and one and the same. I’m writing my better self and he’s writing his worse and vice versa and so on until the end. A
good
reader—a good
detective
—knows this by now. If you don’t, look in the mirror. That’s you and not you, after all, because the person in your mind
isn’t
the person in the world. And if you don’t know this already, you will.

On the West Side Highway, Alice’s bus three cars ahead, Pepin caught sight in his driver’s side mirror of a black Ford F-150 pickup, something you never saw in Manhattan, so absurdly large and impossible to parallel park, its hemi roaring like a lion. In the cab, Mobius looked like a child steering the wheel of a giant yacht.

Pepin, in the center lane, let him pull alongside, slowly drifting back into his blindspot, then hit Send on the cell.

“What is it?”

“You said there were two moves I could make.”

“That’s right,” Mobius said. “Straight or swerve.”

“What do you think I’ll do?”

“You? You’ll always swerve.”

“Bingo.”

Pepin yanked his car left, driving the nose into the Ford’s rear wheel and spinning it perpendicular to his hood, pile-driving the truck down the road as white smoke swirled around them, Mobius’s arms stuck straight out as he fought the steering wheel, his shoulder pressed to his window, Pepin flooring the accelerator. Horns, behind and wailing past, stretched like strands of gum as the current of traffic flowed closely around their
collision. There was a
pop
, as hollow and deadened as a spinnaker gone taut with wind, and the truck was shot airborne and flew over Pepin’s hood to become a cloud of smoke and destruction in his mirror, hailing glass as it rolled. He hooted, cursing happily, slapping the dash, and turned to look, the weaving traffic sealing off the wreck’s rising smoke, then cut his eyes forward and saw a car crossing into his lane. He swerved, felt the car fishtail and, overcorrecting, went spinning slowly, inexorably, his palms beating the steering wheel. He was briefly facing the traffic, the cars as vivid and fixed as the faces you blur by in a subway station, and then they flashed past, supersonic, as he slid diagonally into a guard rail—a collision so jarring that his neck and back cracked. He’d come to rest, alive. Through his shattered windshield he saw Alice’s bus shrinking into the distance, the kids’ faces plastered to the rear windows—and Mobius’s truck, miraculously righted, spectacularly damaged but operable, roaring by in pursuit.

He restarted the car. It drove, but just barely, the driveline or axle or something dragging along the road beneath him, the left wheel well so punched in that it restricted his turning. He hobbled to the exit at 96th Street and spotted a parking lot across Riverside.

“What the fuck happened here?” the attendant said.

Pepin dug a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and slapped it into the man’s palm. “Park it somewhere safe.”

Then he ran.

It was hard, David felt, to remember much of anything from Dr. Otto’s class—the discussions, that is, and lectures, so many hours now lost. What he did remember, however, were first moments, first viewings, how priceless it was to be in the presence of works so great—so entertaining and romantic, so new he could never see what was coming—that life up to that point had suddenly seemed lacking. The movies made him feel utterly alive. There was the scene in the wine cellar in
Notorious
when Cary Grant unwittingly pushes a wine bottle toward the edge of a shelf, and if the bottle shattered it might be his and Ingrid Bergman’s undoing, a moment so suspenseful he and Alice took each other’s hands instinctively; and when it did fall, Alice screamed. He remembered Grace Kelly leaning in to kiss Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
, her shadow blanketing his face—without question, Pepin thought, the most beautiful woman that ever was. Or Tippi Hedren sitting in a schoolyard smoking, following a lone crow flying across a cloudless sky and landing on the monkey bars, revealing that the whole playground was packed with thousands of the black birds.

He could go on. But there was one night in particular. He was riding his bike home from the evening viewing, his mind lambent with images, associations, connections. He couldn’t recall now what film he’d just seen, only that he’d stopped his bike on the dark road, warmed by and alive with the love and genius in the art, so grateful for it that he wanted to wait there and feel it course through him. This is what life is, he thought, a giving to the void. The artist made—he gave—and I received, and my life,
this
life, would be nothing without somehow giving something back.

He knew this as certainly as he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Alice.

Out of the cab, Pepin paused—befuddled, defeated, and horrified by what he saw. There were school buses
everywhere
.