Mr. Peanut (46 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Don’t say you don’t, because you’re smarter than that.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I mean, you’re the smartest man I know.”

“You act like we can both just change. You act like all you have to do is snap”—he snapped his fingers—“and it’s done. Like your whole life is something you can throw off. But it isn’t. We
can’t.”

“Yes we can.”

“You haven’t been able to.”

“I know,” Alice said. “But I was afraid. I’m not afraid anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said, “there’s nothing after us.”

It was true. Without children, their marriage was only about each other. It had never occurred to him before, but now that she’d said it, he realized it was something he’d been afraid to admit.

“I’m not sad about that anymore,” she said. “I’m not even mad. In fact, now I think it’s what makes us special. Singular. You’re the
only
way I see the world. You’re it. I know it sounds romantic, but that’s how much I love you. I can’t imagine you gone.”

“But you’re the one who’s been gone!”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “That’s why I know. So, I propose an experiment: us.
We’ll
be the experiment, but not in the classic sense. We’ll be purpose
without
procedure. The procedure’s the part we’ll make up.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“That we forge ahead.”

“Toward what?”

“Something new,” she said. “Some
where
new. Tomorrow. Let’s just go.”

“Like where?”

“You pick.”

“I’ll leave this one to you.”

“All right. I, for one, have always wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef.”

“Oh,” he said, “Australia.”

“The land down under.”

“Or should we call it Oz?”

“Please,”
she said. “This is our chance.”

He stood up, leaned against the stove, and stuffed his hands under his arms. This was silly, he thought. It was unreality. The reality was that he’d slept with another woman tonight and wanted to sleep with her again. Oh, to have light little Georgine spinning on him like a top! What would Alice say if he told her that? How exciting would their experiment be if he told her he’d already started one? Didn’t that prove there
could
be no experiment?

“We can do anything,” Alice said. “We love each other.”

“Anything?”

“Anything we want.”

“Well, right now I want to go to sleep.” He felt so terribly disengaged and tired with their life together that he could barely bring himself to walk down the hall.

“I know you don’t believe me,” she said, “so I’m going to show you.”

“Yes,” David said, “you do that.”

The next morning he woke in the middle of the bed, stretched across it diagonally, and for a blessed moment he thought his conversation with his wife was something he’d dreamed. He sat up, then recalled Georgine bucking
above him and wondered if that was a dream too. But it wasn’t. Sunlight flooded the bedroom, though not brightly enough to annihilate his regrets. It was windy outside, brilliant and clear, too beautiful a day to feel so terrible.

He called his wife’s name but the only reply was the refrigerator’s motor shuddering to life. He looked at the clock. It was almost eight thirty. He could smell acrid, bottom-of-carafe coffee, so he went to the kitchen and made a new pot. He thought about Georgine and felt no small degree of shame, then wondered how he might handle what had happened between them: best to end things immediately, have a talk over lunch, say, and be done with it. Though another part of him was wondering what he should wear today and what her reaction would be when she saw him, because he was so excited to see her he couldn’t wait to get in to work. And another part of him was so mortified that he thought about calling in sick for the rest of the week or going somewhere new like Alice had suggested, remote, out of cell phone or e-mail range, like the Congo.

Alice’s note was propped against the coffeemaker.

Reading her note a second time, David was surprised at his lack of emotion—perhaps because he didn’t believe a word of it.
There’s a chance I may not return and that terrifies me
. Please, he thought. This was yet another go-around of some kind and Alice would be back—maybe by tonight. He imagined her showing up at their door—a search through her closet revealing she hadn’t even taken a suitcase—with her head hung low,
embarrassed or perhaps even angry with him over her newest failure. “Don’t say it,” she’d say, and he wouldn’t, and she’d go back to the bedroom and begin the period of waiting for both of them to forget what had happened—or hadn’t.

He decided not to give the matter any more thought. Meanwhile, he concluded, he had to end things with Georgine as quickly as possible, so in the shower, he rehearsed what he was going to tell her, and how, and where, and he took extra time shaving and grooming and tried on three different shirts before heading into the office. Walking to the subway, he called Alice’s cell phone. A recording explained that the number wasn’t in service, and this news annoyed him. It was just like her previous diets. He could see himself calling their cell phone company when she returned by week’s end, paying a reconnection fee, maybe even having to buy another phone. On the platform, he stood near the yellow line as the train came barreling down the tracks. Against the cars’ reflection, he could clearly make out the frown on his face before the train gradually halted before him. It would be the same thing as her teaching, he thought. When she’d left Trinity midyear, it made getting another job nearly impossible—thus Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School for the emotionally disturbed. But that wasn’t his problem anymore.

No, if Alice can take a holiday from me, David thought, running his hand up Georgine’s leg as she stood behind his desk, then I can take a holiday from her. The office door was open and he and Georgine pretended to work while he touched her, feeling his way past her panties, the both of them gone quiet, Georgine radiating heat and her eyes half-closing.

“When,” she whispered, “can we get out of here?”

Later, on the rear balcony of Georgine’s Greenwich Village apartment, drinking orange juice out of the carton, David felt like a convict who’d made it safely across the border. Why even give Alice a thought? Why not take her up on her offer and live as if she were gone for good? He could hear Georgine humming pitch-perfectly in the bathroom while she dressed to the sound of a piano playing across the courtyard. From his perch, he watched the songwriter in the apartment to his left play a few chords on his piano and then make notes with a pencil he kept behind his ear, the old man in the apartment with him—a cowriter, perhaps—nodding approvingly while he wound the clock on his mantel. David nodded as well. The music, he thought, was like a soaring love song about freedom! He himself felt free and young again, and a keen sense of surprise about everything at the moment—this view, for example, and his newfound sex partner, in fact
his whole life! He felt capable of remarkable, undreamed-of things, the bones of his new wings—humerus, ulna, radius, and manus—springing from his back and spreading wide in the bright sun. Was this the new world Alice was talking about? The new state of affairs? Or had his body and mind been transformed only because she was gone?

Alice didn’t come home that night. Or the next night, or the following—nights that soon turned into a week and then into two. Initially, David was untroubled by his wife’s absence, though out of habit he called out her name whenever he came home. There was a novelty to his solitude, plus the apartment was all his. He could order in and not take the garbage out. He could eat anything he wanted and catch any movie on a whim. And conversely, her desertion made him feel her presence acutely. It was like a tug-of-war between perfectly matched opponents, a stalemate that wouldn’t end until one side grew exhausted and let go—and he wasn’t about to do that.
He
was going to ride this out.
He
was going to hold on.
He
was going to be here when she came back. And she
was
coming back.

Two weeks turned into a month—October now—which turned into two. To pass the time, he kept himself occupied with Georgine, but it was strange. As time wore on, he needed to pretend that Alice might show up any second for their trysts to remain hot. If the phone rang in his office while Georgine was blowing him, he had to convince himself it was Alice calling from the front desk. If his cell phone rang while he and Georgine were in a hotel, he made her answer it while he was inside her. “He’s right be
hind
me,” she said, and handed him the phone. If they were walking on the street together and he saw a woman who resembled Alice, he took Georgine’s hand and picked up the pace, just to get close enough to be sure.

One night—four months now, maybe five; it was January and he counted backward—he even convinced Georgine to come home with him. His wife, he said, not untruthfully, wouldn’t be back until very late. It was a risk, he admitted, standing at the door, but he wanted them to have sex in his own bed. He’d never felt hornier in his life. When they entered, he called out Alice’s name.

“Jesus,” Georgine said, “is she here?”

“I don’t know,” he told her, practically laughing. Unsure they were alone, he showed Georgine inside quietly, careful to leave the front door ajar. To set the mood, he turned on the stereo, raising the volume loud enough to be unable to hear Alice come in unannounced. In spite of Georgine’s protests, he left the bedroom door wide open as they undressed. Then, in knots so complicated they’d be impossible to undo quickly, he tied
her wrists to the bedposts with two of the ties Alice had given him for past birthdays. Ties, he thought as he dropped his pants, when the fuck do I wear ties?

“You’re positive she won’t show up?” Georgine said. She was honestly scared.

“No,” he told her, scared himself. “I’m really not.” And he made love to Georgine angrily and passionately, right in plain sight, as if Alice had been there to see.

Where
had
Alice gone?

True, he thought, as five months became six and seven and winter became spring, he’d been unfaithful and had to call things off with Georgine immediately. True, he and Alice were in some kind of rut, or crisis, or limbo, or unnameable terrible place. But this stunt she’d pulled wasn’t funny anymore! They never had spent such a long stretch apart, and although he didn’t miss his wife
at all
and was still very,
very
glad she’d decided to take this break or hiatus, the thing that was driving him crazy about her little experi-vacation, or her disappearance of self-discovery, was that he had no idea what to do with all of this goddamn time!

Of course, it was the perfect opportunity to get some writing done, he realized, and by the beginning of May, the ninth month, he finally took his manuscript out of the box and read the pages leading up to where he’d gotten stuck. He looked them over again and again until he came to the same dead end. Being in the middle of a novel was like being trapped inside a tangled ball of yarn. It was different than designing a game. A game’s players could enjoy infinite variations of action, but the lines of code, albeit vast, were limited. You were building a kind of wind-up toy that you too could see go. Once you’d written yourself into the middle of a novel, however, it seemed it could grow and grow around you. He stared at the page and waited and then stared some more. It was so peaceful now, so perfect with the house quiet and the world calm, but with Alice absent, his concentration was shot, his imagination dead. It was as if the book suddenly lost all importance and had no reason to come into existence. He sat at their kitchen table and looked at one page for so long that the page disappeared, and his thoughts turned back to their last conversation and his wife’s idea of living as if they were an experiment—as purpose without procedure. He didn’t know what she meant, exactly, but he did know that the process of writing fiction was purpose without procedure. You felt some sort of resolution or ending luring you forward but had no idea really how to actually arrive at it, though you had to get there nonetheless. Life, when you came right down to it, was like that too. Oh, the psychologists and philosophers,
the politicians and priests, posited paths for you, but how often did people, in spite of all this advice, really feel sure of their way? Didn’t think someone else knew something that they didn’t? Was on to something better than you were? Was on the right road while you raced into oblivion? Was this what Alice was doing? Was this what she was trying to show him? That with the slightest effort they could get off the path they were on, singly or together? Had they together somehow been hiding from each other this truth? Was this a chance to figure out a correction from here on out? Was her disappearance less a desertion and more of a gift?

Maybe give her idea a try, he thought, then asked himself what he felt restricted by.

His book. Unfinished, his book consumed his life.

He wanted to finish it but didn’t know how to. He hadn’t a clue as to how it ended. Throw it away, Alice had said; trash it. But then the fact that the book had been abandoned incomplete would gnaw at him forever. Even Alice should have known that. David remembered what she’d told him at the doctor’s after her third miscarriage—that she’d most likely never be able to carry a child to term. “Nothing sticks to my insides,” she’d said to the doctor, and wept. But the worst part, she told David later, wasn’t that they’d never be able to have children. No, it was that she constantly thought about the children she hadn’t been able to have. “I think about those little peanuts all the time,” she said.