Mr. Peanut (19 page)

After several minutes he came back inside.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Please.”

He waited. She went still. Then she got onto her knees, the sheets curled around her like a pedestal.

“Don’t make me say it,” she said.

He fled the room, went to the bar downstairs, and drank until he couldn’t keep his eyes open. When he came back upstairs she was asleep.

He woke in the middle of the night to find her gone. The doors to the lanai were open and the sound of the breeze and palms filled the room, the curtains floating as gently as the tentacles of jellyfish. He called her name, but the terror he felt made breathing difficult. He was sure she’d stepped out onto the veranda and jumped, so sure that after getting up he was afraid to lean over the side and look. He could imagine her body down there, white and undiscovered under the moon. It would not, he thought, be such a bad way to die, and considered it for a moment himself. He imagined the fall. He could imagine the peace it might bring; how long would the fall take? He wondered too what it would be like to return home without her, without anything: the plane ride back, the cab to the apartment, opening the door and stepping inside. What would it be like never to hear her voice again? A kind of loneliness, he supposed, from what he was feeling now, the kind that was nearly self-canceling, a loneliness he couldn’t conjure up.
In
love, you could never remember what it was like to want it.
In
love, it was impossible to conceive of the other truly being gone. As for the coming of a child, you couldn’t prepare your heart for it. There was nothing to know until it happened. It was all new.

He went downstairs to look for her. The shops were closed, the gates down. In the lobby, a Japanese clerk was doing paperwork at the front desk. She looked at David, smiled too brightly for the hour—past three in the morning—and went back to her job. A Hawaiian man buffed the floors. In the lounge, a clerk was already setting up coffeemakers, restocking condiments, and pushing a cart on which there were newspapers from all over the world. David stepped out onto the large terrace, the one that overlooked the dolphin lagoon, and spotted Alice on the walkway below.

She was leaning against the fence that surrounded the two pools, her chin resting on her crossed arms. He knew she could hear him coming, and when he stood next to her she didn’t speak. It was humid, but cool. Even in the dark, he could see the goose bumps on her arms. He leaned against the fence as well and waited, too afraid to try to hold her. Occasionally the dolphins
surfaced, gray figures on black water, making small jet sounds as they exhaled.

“I don’t think I can go back,” she said.

“Back where?”

“Home.”

He wondered for a moment if these animals, so long around people, shared the same curiosity that humans felt about them.

“Would you stay here?” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. But I’m terrified of our apartment. I had a dream about us walking in there, and it woke me up.”

“Why?”

“Because when we left he was inside me.”

They didn’t speak for a minute or two.

“Would you take me with you?” David asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He could feel the dolphins swim by: a pulse of energy that didn’t even disturb the water’s surface, except for a slight wake you noticed only when little waves rose suddenly up the rocks lining the shallows. They never seemed to
break
the surface, merely spreading it gently, like curtains, over their heads and backs. “What was it like?” he asked.

“What?”

“Being pregnant.”

“What do you mean?”

“The feeling.”

He recalled what Harold had told him about listening. There were, of course, different versions of this—or, rather, all sorts of unheard sounds: a lazing dog exhaling while waiting for you to call it; the silence of a room after a fight; the sound of a stadium where people were leaving before a loss; toys waiting in a playroom for the child; the book on the shelf that’s been whispering to you. He heard Alice relax, as if whatever was roiling within her had stopped churning for a moment.

“It was like you were special,” she said. “I don’t know how else to describe it. But it was like the world was better. You had something inside you that made you more alive.”

If he were struggling to speak with her, she was struggling to look at him.

“I want to go to bed,” she said.

In the morning, they slept late. David ordered coffee and suggested they get something to eat.

“Good,” she said, “I’m starving.”

The front desk called to confirm their reservations to swim with the dolphins at ten thirty, and when he told her about this, she seemed pleased.

At breakfast they sat outside, facing the ocean. Alice chose the buffet: pancakes rolled into long cigars and soaked in syrup; a ham, cheese, and chive omelet made fresh at the omelet bar; another plate piled with fruit, bacon, and prosciutto, even a few pieces of sushi. David, his stomach weak from the night before, had oatmeal and coffee.

“Let’s sit out here for a while,” she said, turning to face the water.

The waiter came and she ordered another mimosa and then sat rubbing her belly.

“My God,” she whispered, looking out at the Pacific.

He didn’t ask.

Nor did he ask what the dolphin trainer had told her as they waded out to the middle of the lagoon, whatever it was that made Alice laugh so hard. He was simply glad to see her seem happy. Along with four other guests, the trainer led them through a series of close encounters and tricks—the dolphin spinning like a top, more than half its body out of water; skimming backward in similar gravity-defying fashion; fetching three rings flung in three directions, collecting all of them, it seemed, the instant they hit the surface—and then took Alice alone out into the middle of the pool. On a small island there was kiosk where people checked in for these adventures and were given life vests and masks labeled SEA QUEST, and David walked halfway up a narrow staircase overlooking the pool to take pictures. The morning sunlight bejeweled the surface of the lagoon, softening every shot, making the images too beatific, too postcard-perfect, but the joy on his wife’s face redeemed them, made them more personal and completely uncontrived. Watching her applaud every trick, and listen to the trainer as they treaded water, and talk with this stranger, he had that precious glimpse of Alice in the world without him, encountering an unabashed joy that seldom if ever presented itself to her—this, moreover, an emotion she didn’t really trust. He thought of her childhood stories, of her acute loneliness, of feeling unwanted, of the belief built into the very core of her character that she was somehow undeserving of love. She
guarded
herself against joy. Their child had brought these defenses down, of course, sent them tumbling like the walls of Jericho. And he admired how, so soon after what had happened, she’d found the strength to give herself over to joyousness
here and
now
. “You seemed to enjoy that,” he said when he met her outside the gate.

She squeezed the water from her hair, took off the life jacket. “What’s not to enjoy?” she said.

Later, they took a cab into Waikiki, though the moment they got there David realized he’d made a terrible mistake. Nothing was beautiful here, nothing took your mind away. It was like a shopping district in any American city, and if you looked straight down Kalakaua Avenue you might as well be in Atlanta or St. Louis. David and Alice walked the streets aimlessly, passing Tiffany’s, Banana Republic, the Gap, Niketown, Brooks Brothers, and Gucci, Bebe, and Abercrombie & Fitch interspersed with one T-shirt store after another, some of them gigantic hybrids, multipurpose shops for all tourists that sold cheap surfer shirts, macadamia nuts, coconut syrup (David bought some), sunscreen and sun hats and sunglasses, wine and beer and liquor, followed by an open-air market whose kiosks—made of fake palm leaves and real bamboo—were full of snow globes, leis, grass skirts, bathing suits, tribal kitsch and faux Hawaiian sculpture ranging from totem poles to dolphins and killer whales, signs that read Hang Ten! photo booths and food stands, square after black-velvet square of turquoise and silver rings, shark tooth and sea turtle necklaces, puka beads stacked one strand atop another on a peg as long as an African’s neck, regionalized knickknacks worn only by the tasteless or infirm, produced in some factory hidden away on the mainland or by children in India or China.

It was wearing on Alice too. “I don’t need any of this,” she said.

“I know.”

“I have zero interest in shopping. Especially this junk.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

“I want a drink,” she said. “I want to sit down.”

One of the hotels facing Mamala Bay had a patio restaurant with uncomfortable, wrought-iron chairs, the servers who patrolled it barely out of their teens. A Cruzan rum card on the table said MAI TAI! David’s beer came in a clear plastic cup—garbage, he thought, that would soon end up in the ocean. Small birds raided every crumb that fell to the floor and swarmed any of the plates the busboys were slow to clear. David counted an astonishing number of fat people.

“I’m starving,” Alice said, looking over the menu.

From here they had a clear view of Waikiki Beach, that famous strip of sand everyone’s seen somewhere, in movies or on television or postcards as ubiquitous as images of the Grand Canyon, so in person it seemed it fell far
short of one’s expectations, seeming instead diminished and banal. There were surfers everywhere, boys and girls and old men and teens, both close in and out far, riding sets of waves so long they seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, the water clotted with swimmers and boogie-boarders navigating between catamarans and large pleasure craft that barreled toward shore at breakneck speed while small planes flew overheard, the sheer density of the crowds like some time warp back to Coney Island of the forties, the black-and-white photos of that beach showing it to be so choked with people there was no sand to see, no reason even to come except perhaps to hate the proximity of your fellow man; it would be like riding the rush-hour subway for fun, he thought, and for the lifeguards glassing these masses from their towers, a drowning among so many bobbing heads and arms and legs must be impossible to catch. From this vantage, Diamond Head seemed nearly overwhelmed by all these people and towers on the beach, by this disease of development, so this majestic sight now could be a sculpture symbolizing America’s ugliness and failure. Terrible, he thought.

“Terrible,” Alice said.

Couple telepathy, they called it. Not that her disapproval affected her appetite. She ordered a main-course chef’s salad with her bacon cheeseburger, a banana daiquiri, a slice of key lime pie. When the food was placed before her, she ate without pause and left nothing for the birds.

“This can’t be Hawaii,” she said finally.

“I know what you mean.”

“This can’t be all of it.”

“No.”

“We can’t have come here for this.” She began to cry.

“We didn’t,” he said. “I promise.”

“Then get us
out
of here,” she said.

When they got back to the hotel, she arranged for a cabana at the beach. He told her he wanted to rest in the room for a while and would meet her later.

The minute he was upstairs, he called Harold.

“We need to go somewhere else,” he told him. “Somewhere pure.”

They went to Kauai.

Though he didn’t know it at the time, this was exactly the place Alice needed, that she’d been searching for since the death of their child—though neither did she realize this until they arrived.

Only a half-hour flight from Honolulu, it’s the westernmost island of the chain, circular in shape, a mere ninety miles around, composed primarily of mountainous, undevelopable land. When checking in at the airport, David was given—thanks to Harold—a brochure thick with maps and so much geographical information that he could only skim it, along with the key to a condominium on the north coast.

Alice hadn’t been searching for beauty, though there was a superabundance here. Later, looking at the pictures from the trip, as he did quite often, David would reflect that Kauai’s beauty was something that photos didn’t really come close to capturing.

For instance, the sweeping view from their lanai, situated on a cliff hundreds of feet above the ocean. To the northeast was a lighthouse shaped like a baby’s bottle and from that distance no bigger than a fingernail. The pictures didn’t suggest the loneliness of the little red-and-white tower with its clamshell glass, which to David seemed like the perfect place to live out your life if you needed to disappear.

Nor did the pictures capture David’s terror staring at the stars on those nights when Alice cried herself to sleep, with a dull moan like an old engine turning over endlessly, resounding through the sliding doors of the lanai even if he plugged his ears. Never had he seen a sky as wide or brilliant as this, or as terrifically violent; he saw tens of shooting stars every night, and, once, what he was sure was a comet because of its slow progress across the horizon, its head brighter than any other star, its tail flickering clearly, on a cataclysmic collision course with who knew what or when or how many light-years away. This sky wasn’t star-hung but star-flung, the universe from this vantage a stage of explosions and near misses. No picture could yield his state of mind, an anxious span of minutes, of hours, spent wondering, semiparalyzed, that since nothing truly bad had ever happened to him until now, why was it impossible to think that this was only the beginning? That the rest of his life was an inescapable strip of suffering, relooping on itself for as long as he breathed. Nor did the pictures capture how golden the sunlight was in the morning or the relief those first rays gave him as he lay on the edge of their bed.

The pictures didn’t capture the grandeur of Waimea Canyon either, the silence of its reddish brown mountains, a quiet augmented by the sight, miles and miles distant, of waterfalls hundreds of feet high, cascades reduced by perspective to tiny hairs, their movement still perceptible, a braided shimmer, your mind tricking you into thinking you could just barely hear their crash, or of what it was like from that lookout to spot goats in the valley two thousand feet below, or to dream of what life was
like as many years previous, to have come here with the Polynesians, to have set foot on this place and thought you’d discovered paradise, to imagine yourself down there, hunting these creatures. To understand that a life based on survival as opposed to love was perhaps desirable. That after seeing this, all apocalyptic dreams seemed a pathetic longing for such simplicity. Nor did the pictures confirm Alice’s seriousness when, staring out over that precipice, she flatly said that she no longer felt like a woman and that if the feeling didn’t return to her, then she wanted to die.