Mr. Peanut (14 page)

Yet sometimes, while the two of them made love, David was tempted in
his fit of passion to pluck out her diaphragm, the very idea of that thing inside her slightly suffocating to him, the annihilation of his sperm causing him physical pain—and killing all those millions of possibilities, his poor penis people! The whole exchange seemed like a microscopic game of Missile Command, and the very thought of ejaculating inside an unprotected Alice was enough to bring him to the verge.

“Oh God,” he cried. “Take it out. Take it out, Alice,
please!”

“You’re ready?” she said.

He stopped. “Are you?” he asked.

She took his face in her hands. Looked at him. Shook her head.

“No,” she said, “I’m not.”

But afterward he felt the most terrific sense of relief. They’d nearly made a terrible mistake.

The conversation continued.

Once, while David was waiting to board an airplane, he saw a mother try to stop her inconsolable daughter from crying. But what made it unique was how loud the girl was. She wailed. She howled. She screamed, no shit, at the top of her lungs, for so long that it made the expression at once literal and surreal too, as if the squalling were a gnome standing on a ladder inside her neck, the topmost rung by her tonsils, and pulling down on the cord of uvula to hold her mouth open, using the girl’s whole head as a kind of loudspeaker. At first people were embarrassed, distraught for the mother, but as the event wore on it turned into a situation. Uncalled for, security came. “We heard screaming,” an officer said. And then people within banshee range began to snicker and then laugh, David among them. He even called his wife.

“There’s this girl,” David said. “She’s screaming. She’s just a kid. Listen.” He held up his phone.

“I can hear her,” Alice said. “Is this a joke?”

“No,” David said. Then Alice laughed too, like it was cute, like it was
just kids
. Whippersnappers.

And this soon became part of their conversation as well, although he never told her what had happened afterward. The child screamed on and on, for so long now that the noise was ambient, ignorable, something you could fall asleep to, “The Star Spangled Banner” playing over hissing TV snow, and while David watched, both awed and amused, the man in a suit sitting next to him lowered the magazine from his face and said, “You have kids?”

“No,” David said, and chuckled. This girl’s energy was amazing. Her sheer stamina convinced him she was gifted. A siren singing her siren song.

“Don’t,” the man said. And then he looked at him until David looked back. “They’ll ruin your fucking life.”

David studied the child until his plane boarded. When he turned back, the man was gone.

The conversation continued. Much of David and Alice’s talk was standard-issue, of course, and repetitive. In music, the term was augmentation: the same notes drawn out over longer periods of rhythm, chords widened over time. Even choosing not to talk about it was talking about it.

“Are we talking about this again?” David asked, and laughed. He and Alice were sitting together in the kitchen’s breakfast nook. He was drunk. It was only a Tuesday. A Tuesday!

“I say we find some pot,” Alice said, pouring herself more wine, “and get high.”

Though what he thought she’d left unspoken was:
While we can
. It was as if choosing to act like a kid made you more of an adult. They drank and drank, then they screwed—angry, tear-your-clothes-off sex—and in the morning, he thought to himself: How long can we keep ourselves so amused?

It wasn’t always amusing.

The conversation could turn toxic, metamorphose and metastasize, could turn on
them
. In fights, they’d put their unconceived child between them and make it take sides: the original preparental sin.

“You’re out of your
mind,”
she said, “if you think I’d ever have a child with someone as selfish as you!”

“Then
don’t,”
he said, “because I don’t want a kid.
You
want the kid.”

“I
knew
it,” she said. “All
along
I knew!”

“Knew? Knew what? What did you
know?”

“Nothing! I know
nothing!”

“And why is that?” David said. “Huh?”

“Because you never say what you feel! And I’m never going to expose a kid to that—ever!” She turned to walk away.

“Oh, go ahead,” he said. “Just walk away. That’s a great fucking lesson to teach!”

“Fucking
lesson?” she said. “Everything’s fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Oh,
please,”
he said.

“Oh,
fucking
please,” she said. “Oh,
fucking
Dad.
Fucking
Mom.”

“No,” David said, waiting to spear her with a glance: “No fucking
Mom
at all!”

But the kid they hadn’t had also made them better people.

“I’m sorry,” David said later.

It was evening now and no lights were on in the apartment. For hours they’d been sitting separately in the dark. Hands in pockets, he’d appeared at their bedroom door.

“You’re right,” he said. “I have a potty mouth.”

“No,” she said,
“you’re
right. I threw a temper tantrum.”

“I had a meltdown.”

“I should take a time-out.”

They laughed, and when they were silent again, he said, “Alice, I don’t want you to think I don’t—”

“Don’t say it,” she said.

It was like practice, David thought, like playing house. The child they hadn’t had was watching them, refereeing, keeping them honest. He or she was already improving their characters. Their boy or girl would tell their spouse one day, “I never once saw my parents fight.”

Later, David and Alice made love. They thought about you know what. But the fight had made them both doubtful, so they didn’t.

What were they waiting for? David wondered. Or were they waiting for nothing? Was there something he hadn’t said? Was there something Alice needed to tell him?

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

They were in their bed, their California king. Days had passed, weeks, months. Summer was at an end. Their conversation had lasted a whole season. It was evening, they had drinks in hand and the television was on. Even when they were broke they’d splurged on this bed. They
had
to sleep comfortably together. Every couple had their unbreakable rules: no shared bank accounts, no going to bed angry, no eating the last X. Their rule: No sleeping in separate beds. Spatially, that was tantamount to divorce: mere coexistence. Separate beds would mean the end.

“I died once,” Alice said.

The woman knew how to get your attention, he thought. It was her loner’s knack, the ability to stand out when necessary. He turned off the TV and adjusted his pillows.

“When was this?”

“When I was eight,” she said.

It was early spring, she said, and stormy outside. Her parents had a fire going and were watching TV—though when Alice said parents, he had to note that she meant her uncle Ladd and his wife, Karen, for they’d raised her, and in his mind he pictured their lakefront home in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He imagined their long sitting room, pine-paneled and carpeted, with pictures of animals—a lion, a pack of wolves, a
leopard—on the wall. Ladd was no nature lover, really, this simply a reflex of naturalist kitsch. Alice had come to live with them under sad circumstances. Her mother, Dorothy, pregnant with a boy six years Alice’s junior, had died in labor, along with her son. Her father, Thomas, a successful inventor, went into such a tailspin that he handed Alice off in order to recover; he managed to gather himself together and remarry four years later, but never collected his daughter. And though she always spoke lovingly of Ladd and Karen, her lingering sense of abandonment was amplified, David thought, by the fact that her uncle and aunt had no children of their own, so Alice was treated from the minute of her arrival as a privileged boarder they provided for, along with the distant contributions of her father, but who was fundamentally alone.

As she’d said, they were watching television after dinner, riveted by the coverage of Prince Charles and Lady Di’s visit to Australia. In the living room, her “parents” had the only pair of reclining chairs that faced the TV screen, so Alice was at the other end of the room, by the fireplace, reading an Archie comic and eating a seedless orange. The volume on the television was turned high, the rain and wind making a fusillade against the roof. Occasionally her aunt and uncle would turn and say something to each other, but she couldn’t hear them over the roar of flame, of the storm, of the talk on-screen—and then she began to choke.

It was terrifically sudden and unexpected, like being dunked from behind in a pool. It was also as if her body had played a trick on her, by shocking the air from her lungs. She was unsure for a moment how to react, oddly embarrassed, like she’d farted in a crowded room. She cupped her hand and raised it to her mouth, ready to catch the mass when she spit it out, gagging as hard as she could, but there was no movement in her throat, and the sound that came from it was merely a small quack. She gagged again, her ears popping with the effort. Already she was at the bottom of the pool, every bubble blown from her lungs. She looked up. Ladd and Karen, no longer talking, were focused on the television. She could see only the tops of their heads above the chairs, their bodies hidden forms to which she reached out until her arm dropped in exhaustion. She doubled over, her fingers clutching her neck. It was like magic or being shot. Some giant bag containing all her energy had burst from inside her to spill across the floor. Little black flames licked the edges of her vision, and it was then she registered something she’d known unconsciously since coming to live with her aunt and uncle, something she’d felt since her mother had died and her father had abandoned her, something she’d seen whenever she told Ladd and Karen about her day and they’d ask questions her story had
already answered or one of them left the dinner table to grab the phone when it rang, something that was part and parcel in the very room’s furnishings, the knickknacks on the coffee and end tables Karen always reminded her were fragile, the gun closet left unlocked, the two chairs before the television, all of these arranged without a child in mind. It was something she hadn’t been able to articulate until now.

She’d have to save herself.

She turned all of her concentration inward to this wet fist of pulp in her throat, focusing all her muscular control on her esophagus, as if she could squeeze the obstruction out. She braced the tip of her tongue against her bottom teeth and forced a gag, trying to clear the passage, but nothing happened. When she gagged again, she could feel her tongue’s deepest reaches, and it made her head shake. It felt as if her temples were about to explode. Though she tried once more, it was like bench-pressing a car: dead weight. She became distinctly aware of the tightness of the mass’s suction, of its perfect, globbed seal around her throat. She was now a torso, neck, and head; the rest of her limbs had been washed away like sand. Without oxygen, her sense of her own extremities was contracting, her awareness circling down a drain.

She began to float, and it seemed as if she was swimming underwater in the darkest night. Either surfacing or diving—there was no telling—she’d either taste air in a moment or feel the freezing edge of thermocline. It was quite pleasant, actually, pure anticipation. She made one last effort—as futile, really, as trying to see your hand in pitch darkness.

Then she was dead.

She knew she was, and it wasn’t a completely unfamiliar experience. More of an awareness, in fact, an eternal state of now—the same, she thought, as being an embryo, the buried memory of that waiting state. She was submerged, there was nothing there, and time wasn’t a concept but an environment.

She came to, but very slowly. Her limbs were utterly still; only her eyes moved. She was like a cat waking in a patch of sun.

Her mouth was full. She inhaled, sucking the pulverized meat back into her throat, then spit it out.

For a long time she lay right where she was.

Ladd and Karen were still watching television and finally Alice pushed herself up on her hands and knees and spit up the remainder, a long rope of drool that refused to detach itself from her mouth.

Between her palms, the mass lay in a formless mound, almost all of its orange pigment gone. She looked up, and through her tears the TV’s light
was in shards, like a child’s rendering of a star. Then Ladd and Karen turned to stare at her.

“I’m alive,” she said to them.

“Of course you are,” Karen said. She looked at her husband, shook her head, and turned back to the screen.

“I’m alive,” Alice said, and began to sob.

For a very long time, she wept in David’s arms. “You’ve got to promise,” she said to him later, “that we’ll never do that to a child.”

“We won’t,” he said. “Ever. I promise.”

She cried for so long that she soaked his shirt, then fell asleep in his arms.

Perhaps, David thought, the most important parts of the conversation were the things they didn’t want to repeat.

He lay there thinking. Did he have a story? He didn’t, and that was his great problem. He did everything he was supposed to do. He had a job and was successful at it. He was a good husband. But on a fundamental level, it was as if his own life hadn’t occurred to him.

He turned off the light.

“We could make a baby now,” she whispered in the middle of the night.

Many weeks had passed. They’d reached out to each other in dreams, as they often did, fondling toward lovemaking, a sleepwalking kind of foreplay that somehow made them freer with each other. After speaking, Alice bit her lower lip and looked at him in the dark. They hadn’t spoken of any of this since her story. David himself had nearly forgotten about their conversation and thought Alice might have as well. But the conversation was over, apparently. A decision had been reached. Either he’d passed some sort of test or she’d worked something out. Although now that they’d arrived at this point, it surprised him that it was so unmomentous. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes for very long. He could say, “No” or “Yes,” but instead said, “We could.”