Mr. Peanut (11 page)

It was a longing for what it felt like when they’d first fallen in love. Is this, he wondered, what it means to grow old together?

There was only one problem he had with their arrangement now that he’d grown accustomed to it. He couldn’t remember what their life was like before, no matter how hard he tried, his memory always coming up short. He could recall doing things together, but it was as if they’d happened to characters in a film watched with the sound off or to shadow-figures in someone else’s dream. He
did
remember the long drive from New York to Knoxville to meet her family—a straight shot of twelve hours—but nothing about how he’d felt about her then or anything they’d said to each other during the trip; forgot how it was that watching her mouth move excited him. He
did
remember their honeymoon on Kiawah Island, how they’d walked hand in hand for hours on those beaches so wide and flat, her palm always remaining dry in his. He recalled the strange sense of romance he’d felt gazing at the wide-armed shrimp boats trolling offshore, how he and Hannah had talked of buying one and making what seemed like the perfect life together. But he could
not
remember what
she’d
felt at these moments, though he was certain she’d told him, nor what making love felt like then, when her body was so precious and new, though he knew that it once was.

He’d struggled, recently, to remember anything she’d ever said.

How did people erase themselves like this? he wondered.

There was only Hannah in bed.

Hannah in bed.

Hannah.

Say her name once, say it over and over again, say it in reverse, and the effect was always the same. At first it was her name and then it was like a heartbeat and then, like a heartbeat, it was something you couldn’t hear.
Self-canceling, it was hide-in-plain-sight magic. She had managed to make their life together disappear.

Out of the blue, Hastroll got a call from Georgine Darcy.

“I’d like to talk with you in private if you don’t mind.”

“Meet me in the bar of the Soho Grand.”

They sat together in one of the booths, which were dark, enclosed, and felt safe. Darcy ordered a martini, drank it, then ordered another. While she waited for it, she lit a cigarette with shaking hands—“Arrest me,” she said—and when she tapped off the ash it was as if she were knocking fruit off a branch.

“I always pick the worst men,” she said. “If I had a sense of humor about it, I’d say it was a talent. But it’s not. It’s something in me. Like I emit a frequency only certain breeds of boys come running to. And what’s insane about it is that no matter how many times I tell myself to look for certain kinds of things in a man, the opposite things, it doesn’t change anything. The ones who love me I find repulsive. The ones I can’t live without don’t love me back.”

Hastroll continued to wait.

Finally, she said, “Can you explain that, detective? I’d think in your line of work you’d have some insight.”

He looked at his large hands folded on the table, hardly considering himself an articulate witness. “The heart,” he said, “is half criminal. The trick is to be vigilant. To keep your eyes open, so if you get a look at this side of yourself you can make a positive ID.”

Darcy lit another cigarette. “What do you do after that?”

Hastroll shrugged. “You turn yourself in.” He looked at his watch. “You have something to tell me, Miss Darcy?”

“I wanted to give you this,” she said, sliding an envelope that was several inches thick across the table. “I thought you’d want to have a look.”

Using his switchblade, Hastroll cut the envelope open, then pulled out a stack of pages.

“It’s David’s book. He gave it to me to read before he broke things off. Needless to say, it wasn’t high on my priority list afterward. But last week, out of the blue, he calls me and asks for it back, so I got curious,” she said. “The first lines were what grabbed me.”

When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn’t kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God
.

•    •    •

Things finally came to a head between Ward and Hannah.

Usually, he came straight home from work, but it was Friday night, it had been a long week, and he wanted to
do
something. He’d seen all the movies, so that was out. He considered going to hear some music, but he’d always preferred the idea of this to actually doing it. He thought it might be fun to have dinner with friends, but he and Hannah didn’t have any; even if they did, how could he explain her absence? Frustrated, he took himself to the bar at the Soho Grand and sat there with other men without women—a whole roomful of them—and for a moment he wondered if their wives had gone to bed too.

Hastroll had four drinks and headed home.

Hannah had gone to bed in May and now it was September and he couldn’t help but notice that in the fall, once the weather has changed, the lights of the city seem to shine brighter than at any other time of year, that on these cold, clear nights, everything seemed honed to a vorpal sharpness, and what in God’s name was the point of them continuing like this?

He searched his heart and mind for the reason behind Hannah’s self-internment but like every other time came up empty. Then suddenly something occurred to him: the way to get her out of bed. The one thing he hadn’t tried was to simply ask her.

True, he’d pleaded with her a great many times, though never per se to get out of bed. This time, he promised himself, it would be different. He’d use an amazing trick he’d discovered when they fought, a unique development he guessed happened only to people who’d been together long enough to know each other’s complaints by rote. One night, after several years of marriage, when an argument began to escalate, he’d said to her, “Stop. I love you, Hannah. Let’s just step out of the ring!” And miraculously they did stop, and then embraced. They ventured on as if the fight was nothing more than a speed bump in an otherwise smooth evening. All was forgotten. Game over. Reset.

Love.

He was buzzed now—drunk, to be honest—but believed with total conviction that if he were to walk into Hannah’s room with enough positive energy and encouragement and say, “Hannah, come on, up up up! I’ve got champagne and cheese and crackers. Let’s have ourselves a snack, then you can get yourself ready and we’ll go out!” she’d just climb out of bed. She would respond to his enthusiasm like someone suffering aphasia, not to what he said but to his happy face. She’d be out of bed before she knew
it. The key here was the element of surprise. He’d barrel her over with excitement. So sure was Hastroll of this plan that he stopped at the liquor store and then the market and splurged on a bottle of Dom and a round of brie (Hannah’s favorite) and a box of Carr’s crackers. He would, in the words of some of the hoods he arrested, do things up right.

All the lights were off when he got home.

This threw him, to be sure, but he strode undaunted through the living room, where the blinds were drawn, Helen Kellered himself around the furniture, then came to and opened the bedroom door. Inside, he could make out his wife’s form divided into stripes of glare through the venetian blinds, sitting in bed with her arms crossed.

“Hannah, come on,” he said, “up up up!” and when he snapped the light switch, nothing happened. The bulb was dead.

“It doesn’t work,” she said.

It was like she’d punched him in the stomach.

“The TV’s dead too.” She pressed the remote quick, three times, in demonstration. “I thought the power might be out, but I can hear our neighbor’s TV upstairs.”

The paper bag in his hand felt like it weighed two hundred pounds. He put it down.

“I even changed the remote’s batteries.” She opened the bedside-table drawer, which she always kept full of Duracells. “I guess I watched it too much.”

Hastroll slumped onto his bed.

“I watched so much TV I killed it,” she said sadly.

He heaved an enormous sigh.

“What’s in the bag?” she said.

“Champagne,” he said. “Brie.” He had to look inside to remind himself. “Crackers.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Want some?”

She peered into the darkness, then sat back again. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so.”

“I thought … ” he said. But then he scratched his head, which felt so heavy he let his chin drop to his chest. “I thought,” he said to his legs, “if I came in here with some champagne and appetizers and enthusiasm that you might get up and go out with me.”

“Out?” she said and laughed. “Out as in where?”

“Out,” he said, “as in the world. But just the living room would be fine.”

“Oh,” she said as he watched her ghostly form smooth the sheets. “No thanks.”

“Why?” he said, and looked up.

She shrugged her shoulders, held them there, then let them fall.

“That’s not good enough,” he said.

She did it again like a child.

Hastroll stood up and put his hands on his knees so they were eye to eye. “That’s
not
good enough.”

She grimaced in pantomime. “Sorry,” she said.

He saw his fist hit her square in the mouth but restrained himself.
“That’s not good enough!”

She stopped looking at him and mutely stared out the window with her arms crossed.

“Did you hear me?”

She didn’t move.

“Is that how it’s going to be now? You’re not going to talk to me either?”

She didn’t speak.

“You … fucking … bitch!” he said.

He grabbed the grocery bag and walked out of the room and slammed the door so hard it seemed the whole apartment rattled. “Fucking
bitch!”
he called. “You hear me? Fucking bedridden, childish
bitch!”
He turned on all the lights and pulled up the shades. “Bitch in the
dark!”
He went to the kitchen and took down their two Waterford champagne glasses, the pair her parents had given them as a wedding present, took the flute he imagined was Hannah’s and pitched it with all his might to the floor, where it disintegrated on impact. “Broken-glass, bedsore-ass bitch!” He popped the Dom, drank the overflow, poured himself a glass, and downed it. Poured another, downed that too. “Champagne-in-my-ass bitch!” He removed the Brie from its box and took a bite out of the wheel, rind and all, then laid out five Carr’s crackers on the counter and smashed them in pistonlike succession, one for each month, shouting, “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!”

He drank the Dom like soda, then smashed the empty bottle in the sink, and began a conversation with his wife.

Though it was at once with her and with himself, the kind of conversation you have if you’ve been driving alone for a very long time, a thinking aloud that strangely focused one’s thinking, the monologue half an act, really, verging on melodrama, and what Hastroll said could’ve made sense
only
to the two of them. It was almost as if Hastroll was speaking a different language, closer to tongues, one that worked strictly by allusion to their
mutual history, that had no more context than an overheard telephone conversation—and a dark, ugly language it was. “But
you
don’t plunge, oh no, you say, ‘Just let it dissolve.’ Have you
ever
seen it dissolve?” And: “You say we need to this and you say we need to that, but
we
means
me
and me needs
we
!” And: “Swallow
my
pride? Did you say swallow? Say again? Oh.
Swallow
. Sorry, I don’t know what that is.”

Needing a drink, he went to the buffet and poured himself a tall one and sat down in his favorite chair, drinking his drink and thinking that he’d be good and hung over tomorrow, no avoiding that now. He could drink water, take Vitamin C and aspirin, add some Vitamin G, stuff himself with pizza, a burger, or wings and fries—it wouldn’t matter. There was no going back once you passed a certain point of drunkenness. Just like murder.

He picked up the phone, dialed the number they’d traced to Pepin’s cell and, completely spent, let the pager ring; and when it beeped he dialed in his number and waited for what seemed like an eternity. He put his head back and stared at the ceiling, for so long that he imagined the ceiling was the floor, a perfect floor that had never once been walked on; and he imagined himself moving around the apartment like this, looking down at Hannah sleeping on the ceiling, tapping the salt shaker and letting it sprinkle onto his plate below. Then, to Hastroll’s surprise, someone called him back, and he picked up before the second ring. “Who’s this?”

“Who’s this?” the man said. His voice was high register: evil.

They waited.

“You first,” the voice said.

“This is Detective Hastroll.”

“Never heard of you.”

“Your turn.”

“I don’t give my name to strangers.”

Hastroll heard a foghorn in the background, a siren wailing, a sound of distant thunder—but that was out his window. A storm was moving in. “Is there something you want?” the voice said.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“An admission.”

“I’m listening.”

“A confession.”

“Go on.”

“You killed her.”

“Who?”

“Alice Pepin. He hired you, didn’t he?”

The voice laughed wickedly. “She killed herself,” he said finally.

“I don’t believe you.”

“No blame! It was perfect!”

“Tell me to my face.”

“You’re a drunken fool.”

“I swear I’ll track you down!”

“A lonely, blubbery moron.”

“Meet me now! I want to see you!”

“Well, well, well,” Hannah said.

To Hastroll’s amazement, there was Hannah, standing across from him in her slip. The sight of her on her feet was so unbelievable that he heard his mouth drop open with a
click
. She leaned forward slightly, a little wobbly.

But before he could say anything, she laid into him. “Is that your
girl
friend?” she said.

He gently cradled the phone.

“Someone to keep you occupied? Give you a little TLC in the meantime?”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

He got up and walked toward her as she walked backward, the arm’s-length space between them like an invisible object with which he forced her into their room. He had that same odd feeling he’d often had whenever they fought. It was partly shame, he guessed; the neighbors must’ve heard them. But he also had a nagging suspicion they were being watched.