Mr. Peanut (44 page)

Poor woman, she thought. Earlier, in the lull after dessert, the two of them talking quietly by the sink, she’d said, “He doesn’t touch me, and that’s fine. I can take that. We’re busy. Him especially. But he
avoids
me. He’s avoiding me now. We get a moment together and he says, ‘The
game
, Nancy, I’ve been waiting to listen to it,’ as if this was the only game ever played. Watch, and you’ll see how he keeps a space between us, like we’re brother and sister chasing each other around a table.” She wiped her eyes. “How did you change things with Sam?”

Marilyn didn’t know. It wasn’t anything
she
did. What she believed was that she’d just waited, that Sam had somehow been waiting too, until and at the same time they were both tired of waiting.

There was no other way to put it.

“It’s nothing that would help you,” Marilyn said. “Please, don’t take that wrong. It’s just … you have be willing to hold your breath longer than you think you can,” she said.

She was sitting on the daybed with Sam now, stroking his hair. He was
sprawled there in the shape of an S, facing her, his corduroy jacket on, hugging himself, his mouth open. He looked like Chip, like a boy. There was just room enough to lie alongside him and she did, listening to him breathing …

She woke. She was cold. She thought to wake Sam but it would take the same effort as it did Chip, and he slept down here all the time. She walked up the stairs to their room and took off her clothes in the dark, folding them neatly and setting them on the chair, putting on her pajamas and then getting under the cold sheets. She was tired of sleeping alone. She didn’t care anymore if Sam woke her up. She’d asked him to push the mattresses together last week, or buy them a new bed. “I want to feel you next to me at night,” she’d said. She’d remind him tomorrow.

Waiting for sleep to come, she couldn’t help it: she thought about Dick Eberling, first about his body revealed in that window as he cleaned it, the plaited armadillo shell of muscles along his stomach, his dark skin browned. She bit her lower lip gently, remembering how he’d looked at the floor and asked if she could like someone like him and then, “For a long time?” It made her sad. Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like—to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To
accept
it, with all of the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.

To her delight, she heard footsteps slowly rising up the stairs and entering the room. She turned around and saw his approaching form.

“Sam?” she said.

“So,” Mobius said.

“So,” Sheppard said.

“Quid pro quo.”

Sheppard reached under his chair and held up the manuscript.

“Is this the only copy?”

“No. But it is the original.”

Sheppard slid it through the bars. Mobius hefted the pages.

“You have until tomorrow morning to read it,” Sheppard said.

“All right.”

“Then you’ll tell me everything I need to know about Alice Pepin.”

“Everything you need to know is right here.”

“No, it’s not,” Sheppard said. “There’s no ending.”

“There will be,” Mobius said.

Sheppard folded up his chair and carried it with him to the guard, who buzzed him out. “He’s a suicide risk,” Sheppard said. “Check his cell every ten minutes. And get a doctor over here immediately. Have his bandages removed and the gauze confiscated. I don’t want him to have anything he can hurt himself with. Get two other guards and strip-search him. And recheck his cell. Strip his bed. Not even a blanket for the night. The only thing he can have in there is the book he’s reading.”

“Yessir.”

Despite those orders, Sheppard thought about Mobius all day. He called downstairs to the guard repeatedly and even returned to the cellblock twice. On both occasions he entered to the sound of Mobius laughing, then stood before the bars as he sat there with tears in his eyes, pointing to the page.

“This is killing me,” he said.

Seeing him calmed Sheppard down. Mobius’s gauze dressing had been replaced with plastic bandages, the guard had checked the cell three times to make sure, and when Sheppard called later that evening, Mobius had just finished dinner without incident. Over the phone, Sheppard could hear him cackling in the background.

Sheppard went to bed. He slept fitfully at first, then slipped into a deep sleep and dreamed, and when he woke he remembered the whole thing completely.

He was back on the beach, chasing down his wife’s killer. But the killer was Mobius, and his wife Alice Pepin. He finally tackled the little man, but he was remarkably strong and as slippery as a fish. When Sheppard tried to punch him, he whiffed, and when he tried to grapple and pin him, Mobius reversed the hold and threw him to the sand. And once again he was overwhelmed, Mobius above him now, his knees pressed to his chest, his fist raised to his ear for the final blow. And before Sheppard woke, before Mobius’s punch fell and blackness came on, he suffered that same sense of terrible defeat, of having not been able to save his wife or overcome her killer, of somehow being an accomplice in the crime.

The phone.

He turned on the light by his nightstand, rubbed his eyes, looked at his watch. It was 4:15.

“Sir,” the guard said. “It’s Mobius.”

“What happened?”

“He’s dead.”

“Dead?” Sheppard sat up. “How?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He choked to death, sir.”

“On what?”

“I can’t say a hundred percent. The paramedics are finishing up now. But it looks like he blocked his windpipe swallowing pages from that novel.”

B
ut the middle, David wrote, is long and hard.

He meant his book and he meant his marriage. At some point his book had become his marriage, or consumed his marriage. Or else his marriage had consumed his book. Did real writers suffer such problems? He certainly didn’t consider himself one. Real writers kept the boundaries between art and life clear, didn’t they? Knew dreams from days. They had to. Otherwise, how could they discern the arc of a story or recognize their themes? Ride narrative logic like a wave, from swell to shore. His book had become something entirely different. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was him. It was Alice. It was them.

His book had become an act of cannibalism.

In the five years since her miscarriages, he and Alice had lived the same routine with minor deviations, and he hadn’t made a lick of progress on his book. He hadn’t written himself into a corner: he’d written himself into a round. His book and his marriage had become a long wait for something to happen.

So he welcomed this recent turn of events. True, he hadn’t needed her to be hospitalized for them to come about, but now Alice was going to change her life! He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but chances were it was something
new
.

In the meantime, however, she remained remote, quick to temper and slow to warm; they hadn’t made love in months. Sometimes, when he came home, he caught her on the phone, which quietly she hung up. “Who was that?” he’d asked. “No one,” she’d say. And they left it at that. Her laptop was off-limits. Her cell phone bill was, of late, nowhere to be found. Her bank and credit card statements were gone. She was going off the grid. She often worked late. She went to suspicious meetings about which she told him nothing, wearing full-on makeup and her nicest clothes. “What’s all this?” he’d asked. “What’s what?” she’d say. He regarded her for a moment. How much weight had she lost? Twenty pounds? Thirty? None at all? He couldn’t say she looked good, just less. But less, in Alice’s case, was still more. Was she having an affair?

“I’m going to the gym,” Alice told him one day.

He watched from the peephole until she was on the elevator, then
rushed down the eight flights of stairs. He followed her east, toward Third Avenue, where she signaled for a taxi and landed one immediately. But when David tried to hail one, there were none to be found.

They never have these problems in movies, he thought, giving up.

He called a car service the next day and instructed the driver to wait on Third. But leaving the building she turned left toward Lexington, their one-way street headed east, and by the time the car made it around the block, Alice was gone.

He called two car services the next day, had one car waiting on Third, the other on Lex, canceling the latter once she headed east.

“Follow that cab,” he told the driver.

“Seriously?” the man said.

“Just do your fucking job, all right?”

Characters in movies never have to park either, and if they do, there’s always a space. If they’re in a rush, they never have to start a PC. There were never delays. In the plots, no time was ever wasted, and why was that?

She got out at the Y.

Why, for that matter, did every Y smell the same? That particular brand of human humidity, of armpit and sweat sock mixed with a healthy dash of pool chlorine. Every time he’d been here, the same retarded man in his caricature’s costume (thick-rimmed drugstore specs, YMCA logo on his T-shirt, too-short shorts, high tops with black socks pulled up knee high) was vacuuming the premises. Were those the only clothes he owned? Was vacuuming all he had to do? “You missed a spot,” David told him, and pointed, and the man thanked him and obediently pushed his machine toward the phantom dirt. David cut through the men’s locker room, a place, he thought, only Dante could have dreamed up. It wasn’t that it was rank or befouled. In fact, it was quite clean and well-lit, the freshly laundered towels as warm as baked bread. By the sinks, combs stood submerged in canisters of Clubman cologne. But there were monsters here, of the human kind, men built of circles and blocks attached to each other who all seemed compelled to walk around naked, blissfully unaware, apparently, of their own deformities, as unselfconscious as children. Dripping with sweat from the steam room or sauna, their skin as red as cooked lobsters, they approached other men as casually as if they’d bumped into each other on the street. “Leland,” one said, “how the hell are you doing?” and the other replied, “Slim, how the hell have you been?”
I’m not looking at your penis
, David imagined was the subtitle followed by,
I’m not looking at your penis either
. But
he
looked. It was strictly an underworld fascination, exactly what Virgil was on to when he offered the tour: such a broad selection, such
a wide range of shapes and sizes, you couldn’t
help
but look. Elephant penises, horse cocks, dog dicks, Jewish men’s shlongs, and donkey dongs. Penises with one nut descended, with one nut, with no nuts at all. Micros on giants, macros on midgets, and vice versa. Black men’s penises, the heads as pink as a dog’s tongue, in sizes confirming and debunking every stereotype; Oriental penises confirming and debunking same. Circumcised penises, the foreskin pulled as tight as a facelift, so little give as they hung flaccid that it looked like they’d hurt getting hard. Even pierced penises—Prince Alberts, they were called—with the hoop poked into the shaft and out the urethra like an ox’s nose ring. It was a panopticon of penises, a field of phalluses, and in the presence of so much dick all David could think of was how no laws seemed to govern the universe—no guaranteed gifts for the good or punishments for the bad, no fairness in what the Lord giveth or taketh away, except for the undeniable fact of corporeality, and thus one’s own death.

He spotted Alice in the weight room. She was on her back, balanced atop an enormous ball, her feet planted on the ground, another ball held in her hands above her substantial chest. Her face flushed, she moved the smaller ball back and forth across her torso while her trainer counted out reps.

He decided to tail her the next evening. He had an excuse to leave home before she did, Jack Stoney’s annual birthday bash. David had asked Alice to come but she declined.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You have a meeting.”

Her eyes flashed. It was the anger he didn’t understand. No, it was how long she could
stay
angry that baffled him.

She got out at the Unitarian Universalist church on 76th and Central Park West, where a group of men and women stood smoking outside.

He waited several minutes before entering, but it was easy enough to find her. He heard her voice down a long hallway lined with rooms full of support groups, AA meetings and Al-Anon and NA. Co-Dependents and Debtors Anonymous. He peeked in the door. Everyone inside was fat, men who had to sit off to the side of foldout chairs, women whose shoulders and bellies were so enormous that it seemed the purses they held in their laps measured the closest their hands could come to touching. She was telling a story—he couldn’t see her, but every word she spoke was clear, Alice interrupted now and again by calls of support, by yeas and amens.

“You know what I mean,” Alice said. “You know what it’s like to know your commute in terms of pit stops. The Hudson News stand for a magazine and a Butterfinger. And a Hershey’s. And a Charleston Chew. Almond
Joy’s got nuts. Mounds don’t. The one that’s just a short walk—so at least you’re exercising—from your track. The McDonald’s on Exit 13, Sprain Brook Parkway, run by hardworking Mexicans, the morning crew that keeps the grease so fresh you never have that bitter taste to the hash browns or fries—and that odd alchemy when mixed with Diet Coke. You know what I mean. You know the hot dog guy on Forty-third and Lex for a quickie before you get home. How would you like it? With everything, of course. The delicate pop when you bite the casing, the bun perfectly moist from the steam, perfectly soft. Thank you, sir, I’d like another. His stand’s right across the street from the Sbarro. Fact: you upload the glucose from potatoes faster than straight sugar, my friends. How do you spell relief? K-N-I-S-H.

“You know what I mean when I say I dream crazy concoctions, that such inventions promise the same bliss as great sex. Forget Subway, my friends.
I
am the sandwich artist. Slice a Krispy Kreme in half, add a thick layer of jelly, spread the other slice evenly with whipped cream cheese. And you’re not going to believe this, but trust me: Add bacon. Add bacon to anything! Peanut butter—I can’t eat it but I can dream—and banana between the halves of a sliced New York pretzel. Prosciutto and fried eggplant between two slices of Sicilian. Cut away any crust. Give me tenderloin
only
.