Mr. Peanut (45 page)

“You know what it’s like to eat the things other people neglect. The chipped chunks of fried batter from KFC, the white knuckle of ligament at the end of the drumstick, the rind stuck to the last remnants of a round of brie, the pieces at the bottom of any bag of chips poured into bowl of guacamole like it was cereal, the plastic string hung with niblets of meat that circles your bologna. You know what I mean when I say that Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A.

“You know shame. You know the laughs that make you fart, so you also know the double fear of laughter. You know the slip and slide of a permanently dirty ass. You know underwear as wide as a kite. Bra sizes lettered like cattle brands, with names like dude ranches: the Double F and the Triple E. You know the urban legend about the morbidly obese woman admitted to the hospital, so fat they found a rotting tuna fish sandwich under the fold of her tit. You know what it’s like to check those folds to find strips of pink, inflamed, sunless flesh caulked with that gunk down the trench, the same yellow, hardened accretion you find behind babies’ ears. You know the sting of a hot rag when you scrub it away. You wonder: What if I just let it grow?

“But permit me a list: You know what it’s like to look up from your plate
and see people looking at you. To get into a car ass first. To dread going to the movies on opening night. To have permanently forsaken wearing boots. To resent shoelaces, loathe stairs. To know that if you were accosted, you couldn’t run. To see a report on obesity on CNN, the teaser when they show people from ass to neck and think, ‘Oh my God, that midsection’s me!’ To see everyone look down when you board a plane. To see the humped space between seats on a bus and think it’s for the crack of your ass. To weigh more than your husband. To be woken by your own snoring. To think you look like a pig when you’re wearing the mask of your sleep apnea machine.

“You know what it’s like to feel trapped in your own body. To feel as if you’re a cripple. An addict when it comes to food. To say, ‘Today, I’m going to get this under control.’ You know when the pain of hunger is so bad those first few hours that you want to cry. You know the relief of breakdown and gorging. You know the guilt afterward. You know the fear of thinking you may continue to grow and grow, like Alice in that house in Wonderland. You could become like one of those poor people too big to leave a room, in need of a winch when the ambulance arrives, in need of firemen with sledgehammers to widen the jamb. You know the forgetting afterward—the surrender.

“But here’s the hope,” Alice said. “You know what it’s like to
change
. Look at yourselves. Look at me! We’ve changed. We’ve changed radically! We got from there to here somehow, though how we did is no longer important. Just look at us. Look at each other right now! Turn to your neighbor! We ourselves are examples of the possibility of transformation. We are arguments against despair. Don’t tell
me
people can’t change! I, my friend, have changed something awful. And so of course I can change again, but not back.

“Here’s the challenge, my hungry caterpillars: To think of your own skin as a chrysalis. To hatch the chick in this adipose shell. You, me, all of us, we can’t get back to what we once were. Those people are gone. Which means underneath all of this is someone new! There’s a matryoshka doll in this matryoshka!

“But how do we get to her? That’s easy: It’s the same as the first rule of writing. We start with what we know. Let me tell you about the children I lost,” Alice said. “That way I can explain to you not just why I eat, the void I’ve been trying to fill, but also what’s been eating
me … ”

But David left. He didn’t want to hear that. He was done with that story. He was done.

He took himself to the party. It was one long beeline, cab to office to
Georgine, who saw him the minute he got there. She looked like she was waiting for him, and she was. He walked right up to her. “Remember what you said about being direct?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Show me where you live.”

By the time he got home, it was well past Alice’s bedtime. He’d turned off his cell phone at Georgine’s, but now, when he powered on, he saw that his wife hadn’t called once. Not a shred of curiosity about when he’d be coming home. Her indifference killed both his anxiety and his regret. He considered taking a shower, washing Georgine’s dusty evidence off Mr. Penis, but what was the point? His wife was fast asleep.

The moment David got under the covers, Alice ran her hand down his stomach. “Make love to me,” she said.

Terrified, he grabbed her wrist and held it.

Naked, she pressed her breasts against his back, the nipples hard as marble, and ran the end of her tongue from his scapula to his neck. “Come on, David,” she moaned. “It’s been
forever.”
She pinned his arm behind him with both of hers, like a police hold, then arched her crotch agilely to where she clasped him, sliding herself up and down the banister of his thumb. “Squeeze me,” she whispered. “Hold me as hard as you can.”

What was with the licking and squeezing? This was new. And the dirty talk? New too. David, fresh off his own transgression, became paranoid again.
Was
she having an affair? Had she learned all this somewhere else? Was she trying out new moves in their bed?

He flipped over as commanded and, in spite of his suspicions, was tremendously aroused, growing an erection so fast he could feel Georgine’s sex flaking off him like brick shedding mortar in an earthquake.

“Kiss me,” she said. He went to kiss her. But instead of lips he found her tongue, extended toward him in the dark. He stuck out his own and touched hers with it, the two fighting for position and rolling round each other like a pair of seals. They Frenched like this for so long that David could feel their spit getting cold. All brand-new, he thought.

He stopped.

“Come on,” she said. “Kiss me.”

“I
am
kissing you.” He went to kiss her again but there was that tongue, stuck out from her mouth like a kid catching raindrops. “What’s with all this?” he said.

“What’s with what?”

“This?” He opened his mouth and went, “Ahhhhhh,” like she was his doctor.

She laughed. “Come on,” she insisted. “Kiss me.”

“Kiss regular,” he said.

“Kiss unregular,” she said.

He could see the whites of her eyes staring at him in the dark.

“All right,” she said, then got out of bed, put on her robe, and went to the kitchen.

“What did I do?” he called. He could hear her filling the kettle with water.

“Nothing,” she said exhaustedly.

For weeks it was like he didn’t exist, and now that he did again, he’d done something wrong.

The tea kettle whistled.

He threw the covers off himself and went into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table, her hands wrapped around a cup of green tea, waiting for him.

“We need to talk,” she said.

It took all his wind. He put his hands on the table and, like an elderly man, pressed his weight against the top while he eased himself down.

Alice tucked her hair behind her ear. Her eyes welled up and she cleared her throat. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, wiping a tear with her palm. “I’ve been so torn up about this for so long that I’ve kept away for our own protection. But I can’t go on like this any longer. I can’t keep it to myself anymore.”

David’s heart was pounding.

“We’re in a rut,” she said.

So utterly relieved for a moment, he asked her to repeat what she’d just said.

“A rut,” she said. “But that’s not the right word. It’s worse. Crisis might be closer, but that suggests we have a choice to make, and I can’t figure out what the choice is between.”

She took a sip of her tea, concentrating, her focus drifting inward. She looked fitter than ever. She had a nice color in her cheeks; tone, if you could call it that, in her thick shoulders and arms.

“Stuck might be it too, but I don’t know if there’s a converse. If we get unstuck, I don’t know if we’re better off. Bored might be a little closer, but I
know
there’s something we could do.”

She reached out to touch his cheek.

“Can’t you
feel
it?” she said. “Where we
are?
It’s like limbo but without
being dead. It’s like everything’s the opposite of the way it should be. Now that we know each other better than ever, we don’t know each other at all. Now that we’ve grown closer to each other than to anyone else, we’ve grown farther apart. I can’t really describe it. But if we stay like this for much longer, I think I’d rather die.”

“Don’t say
that,”
David said.

“Am I really alone here?”

“No.”

“So the question I’ve been trying to answer,” she said, “is what to do about it.”

“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

He thought of Georgine. “You first.”

“Do you ever think maybe we should live our life from here on out like an experiment?” she said. “Treat our marriage like the moon shot, like space exploration? The final frontier! I know I’m being vague, but think about it. Why do we live here, for instance, and not somewhere else? Why not dedicate our lives to living in every one of the United States? To eradicating world hunger? Raising free-range chickens in the French countryside? How about we become marine biologists and study the Great Barrier Reef? I don’t even know what it is. It’s because I’ve been so busy with
me
. I’m so busy with me I’m dumb. I want to unlearn me. How about we hike the Appalachian Trail?”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m serious,” she said, “though those are still the wrong examples. But what are we
afraid
of, David? What’s holding us back?”

“From what?”

“From whatever we’re not
feeling
. From whatever we’re not
doing.”

“What aren’t we feeling or doing?”

“More.”

“I feel like I feel plenty. I feel like I
don’t
want to feel any more.”

She nodded. “I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about the last few months. You’re still not understanding me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What if we thought of our marriage as an experiment in the achievement of mutual bliss?” she said. “What if we vowed, I don’t know, to fuck every day—like some kooky Guinness stunt but with no interest in breaking any records? I don’t mean just hump. I mean dedicate a certain period of time every day to giving each other some novel form of pleasure.”

“Are you saying our sex is bad?”

“I’m saying we need the
new
, David. We need New Zealand or Newfoundland. A new state of affairs. A new
world
. What?” she said. “What is it?” David had covered his eyes.

“I agree,” he said, shaking his head.

“But what?”

But
why
, after he’d been fucked cross-eyed by another woman, did Alice want to reinvent fucking? Why, after desperate weeks of
not
addressing their problems, did she so desperately want to address them now? Wouldn’t it have helped their situation just a little if they’d talked about this, say, yesterday?

Alice took his wrists and uncovered his eyes. “Look,” she said, “what if we wrote down everything in our lives we felt restricted by and vowed to help each other become unrestricted.”

“You mean sexually?”

“Sexually, spiritually. Physically, spatially. Sure, sexually for starters.”

“Are you saying you want to sleep with other people?”

“Are
you?”
Alice took his hands in hers again and squeezed them. They were warm from her tea and his were cold. “Do you want to take a lover, David? In a way, that’s what I’m getting at. Take a lover and tell me all about it. Or don’t. But you get what you want because I free you to get it. I’ll help you get it and then you help me.”

“I don’t want a lover,” he said. It was a lie, though as it applied to what Alice was saying, it was true.

“You must want something,” she said.

It was a desire that had haunted him ever since he’d started his book, but instead of saying what it was, he said, “What do
you
want?”

“Oh.” Still holding his hands, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I want … to be a cannibal in Papua New Guinea and learn how to shrink a head. I want to ride a camel in the desert and see a mirage and then find water there. I want to join a cult and be deprogrammed and then I want to become a deprogrammer. I want to feel what it feels like to spend an unlimited amount of cash until I don’t have a dime to my name. I want to be shipwrecked on a desert island for years and build huts with elevators like the Swiss Family Robinson.” Pulling at his hands, she lowered her head and faced him. “I want,” she said, “to make you
impossibly
happy.”

David could barely keep his head up, he was so distraught. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say ‘yes.’ Say ‘When can we start?’”

“When can we start?” he said sadly.

“Right now,” she said, and smacked the table. “Could you walk away from Spellbound?”

“Sure.”

“Do you have to live in New York?”

“No.”

“Tell me, when are you going to finish your book?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Your book. That you’ve been working on.”

“How the hell do you know about that?”

“Well, I saw some pages on your desk one day, but I only read a few words. It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Have you finished?”

“No.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I don’t know how it ends.”

“Trash it,” she said. “Burn it. Throw it away.”

“No,” David said. He dropped her hands.

“Then go off somewhere. Just finish it. If I knew you were doing that, if I knew you had the end in sight, maybe I’d know what I was waiting for.”

“I don’t need to go away to finish it.”

“But you do need to
finish
, right?
We
do. This is what I mean. If it holds you back, if it keeps us apart, if it weighs you down—like my weight does me—then go. Or let it go. Then I can go too.”