Mr. Peanut, page 4
Pepin closed his eyes, exhaling sharply, then opened them. “We got separated. I lost her.”
“How?”
“I went to the bathroom, but when I came back to the dining hall she and the class were gone.”
“Did you manage to find her again?”
Pepin shook his head. “I looked for her, but then there was the accident.”
“What accident?”
Pepin held his hands up as if it were obvious. “The blue whale,” he said.
Sheppard remembered now. He’d caught the headline on CNN, the frantic interviews and eyewitness accounts, the fears of a terrorist attack. Still, he didn’t make the connection. The blue whale model had broken away from the ceiling and fallen into the crowd. Amazingly no one was injured, but the museum was immediately evacuated as a precaution. “Were you there when it happened?”
“I was just coming into the Hall of Ocean Life,” Pepin said, “when there was this huge crash and then white dust everywhere, fiberglass or plaster just billowing all over the place. People were panicked and running everywhere, so I ran out too and looked for Alice outside. But it was madness. The firemen and rescue crews were pushing people back. No one could give me any information, so after a while I decided to go home.”
“Why would you leave?”
“It was total chaos. Home seemed like the place to wait.”
“What time was this?”
“I don’t remember. I could’ve been there a couple hours. It was three, maybe four.”
“And once you got to your apartment?” Watching carefully, Sheppard could see him remembering the scene.
“She was … just sitting at the kitchen table with that plate.” Pepin’s eyes welled up. “She’d gotten there before me somehow and was just sitting there, and then she … ” He shook his head.
“She didn’t say anything to you?”
Pepin covered his mouth.
Sheppard couldn’t help it; he was furious.
“She just decided—out of the blue, with nothing between the two of you but a disagreement, in fact nothing but an invitation to run away together—to kill herself?”
But now Pepin was crying. “I can’t talk about this anymore.”
This deep into the diet—ten weeks in and over thirty pounds lost—Alice’s behavior began to change. It was the same as the onset of her depression, those weeks when she’d decide, without consulting him, to go off her medications, David missing the signs every time. She could be just as erratic, as maddeningly touchy and forgetful, as given to sudden, inexplicable crying jags.
Now her temper was short.
“Tell me what you see?” Alice said. She demanded he get up from his desk and follow her. She led him to the living room and pointed to a candlestick in a holder. In the evenings, Alice liked to light candles in the apartment.
“I see a candle,” David said. Seized by sympathy for his wife, he’d gone out and bought her new spiral beeswax candles. Vowing not to mention this gift but wanting to wait for her to notice, he went home, fitted them neatly into their holders and, when it turned dark, lit them all.
“I see a crooked candle,” Alice said. “I see wax all over my table.”
David looked. Wax spread like a smooth scab over the cherrywood.
“Did it even occur to you,” she said, “that at this sharp an angle the candle might drip?”
It had, but for some reason he’d ignored it. “I’ll clean it up,” David said.
“I don’t want you to clean it up. I want you to tell me why you left it crooked.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“Then I want to know why you didn’t think.”
Her eyes flashed, her stomach rumbled as audibly as distant thunder. It occurred to David to count Mississippis. Was the storm coming or going? “It was careless,” he conceded, then went for a razor blade to scrape up the mess.
“You bet it was careless,” she said.
She followed him, railing. And while walking to the front hall closet, where he kept his tools, David wondered what the neighbors must think of their marriage, though he knew that all of Alice’s yelling was really about food; and when all he could find in his tool box was a box cutter, he went to the bathroom for his straight razor; and when he closed the medicine cabinet to see her face right there, wild-eyed, he pushed her out into the hall until there was space between them, then swung both his arms like an umpire calling a runner safe.
“I wish you’d stay fat!” he shouted.
Alice froze.
“Did you hear me?”
He took a step toward her, and she took a step back and then stopped, petrified.
“Every few months we go through this,” David said. “Every time with the diet. It takes over everything. You call me at work, it’s all you talk about at home. It takes over your moods, it kills our sex. Every time I get a minute to myself, every time I get some momentum going, like clockwork you start up with it again.” He waved a finger in her face. “Do you have any idea what I could have accomplished by now? Do you? So I wish you’d just stay fat.”
Alice stood there, feeling for the wall. Only then did David realize he was holding the straight razor in his other hand.
He left the apartment and walked downtown without a clue as to where he’d end up. It was snowing heavily, cars whispering along, hissing into a quieter distance, disappearing in a blaze of floating brake lights behind curtains of snow. Here, outside, David could no longer hold his anger together; it dispersed, flying off into the night toward the hidden towers above. He stuffed the straight razor in his pocket and scolded himself for his lack of fierceness. Perhaps he should rekindle his anger indoors. He passed a pub lit by Christmas lights, the bar crowded; but he knew that to sit and drink in a strange place among strange people would make him self-conscious, would only send him home faster. He turned up the collar of his coat. Flakes of snow landed softly on his neck and melted on his black hair. He turned west now on 57th Street and caught sight of his reflection in a black storefront; he could stand to lose weight himself. He stopped at Tiffany’s, his breath fogging the small display window, the whole building seemingly built to encase these few visible jewels. Then he turned up Fifth Avenue and looked over at the gold and emerald Plaza, refurbished and gleaming, Sherman and winged victory demanding he halt. He stood before the Pulitzer fountain, mesmerized by it, the pool ruffling, illuminated from below and resembling a cascade of diamonds. He was suddenly cold, a bone-cold he imagined people stranded in the mountains or who slept on the streets in winter might feel. Alice would stop with her diet, he knew, and in a matter of weeks would gain the weight back. Things would return to how they were before; she would return to being his wife. Because this was how it always went, David thought, the way it always happened. And sometimes it felt like too high a cost, though he now believed he had reserves of patience he hadn’t tapped. He considered what she’d been through, what their marriage had cost her, how she’d changed. And he suffered such a terrible sense of self-loathing that for a moment he felt he might fall to his knees and rend his clothing, act out some biblical display of regret, or dive into the fountain to freeze away the pain.
He hurried home.
When David opened the door to their apartment, he heard the sound of retching. There was garbage on the floor, open to-go boxes that formed a Hansel and Gretel trail to the kitchen. The candles he’d bought had burned down to their wicks. He called his wife’s name. Nothing. The kitchen table was a disaster of enchiladas, chiles rellenos, tacos—all partially consumed. Terrible, he thought, a feeding frenzy. She’d finally broken down and ordered in for twelve. The burritos had gash marks that leaked meat, salsa was splattered across the counter and stove, and that’s where the vomit trail started.
“Alice?” he called, and heard a groan from the bathroom.
He found her semiconscious, collapsed between the sink and toilet, one arm draped over the rim, the other laced through the sink’s plumbing. The room smelled of stomach acid and shit—her legs were covered in it—and her breathing was like an animal’s, the shallow breaths of a bird. The walls and floors were streaked and spotted with puke, the ends of her hair matted with it so that they appeared as brittle as coral.
“Alice!” David screamed. He grabbed the phone, dialed 911, and rushed back to her. “Alice, what did you do?”
He pulled her up by the shoulders and tried to lay her down. Her eyes rolled back. Her head slumped, then struck the tile.
“What did you do?”
She whispered something incomprehensible. Spittle bubbled at her lips, then popped.
David leaned in closer.
“Mi Corazon,” she said weakly. It was their favorite Mexican restaurant.
Please, sir, stay calm. Please, I need you to stay right here on the line with me, sir, and just tell me the state she’s in.
Sour cream, salsa, and mole, cayenne, cumin, and chipotle: they rolled off the tongue as smoothly as her stretcher did along the hospital floor. Alice opened her eyes to look at him, his head flying upside down above her own. They hurried Alice into the OR, but before they took her away David leaned down to kiss her cheek. He let go of her hand, said her name once more, and then watched as the double doors down the hall swallowed her up.
In the hospital room, David sat across from Alice’s bed and watched her for hours.
At times he dozed in his chair and occasionally slept fitfully and when he woke she was still unconscious. Once he got up to listen to her heart, and after that he went to the window; in the coned beams from streetlights below, he saw that it was still snowing; then he turned and watched Alice some more. With no change in her condition he sat in his chair and slipped off to sleep himself, a sleep of no dreams. There was snow on the ground when he woke up that morning, snow on the windowsill, snow across all the buildings and water towers of Manhattan. The wind was high and strong and gusts beat the pane, punting the glass. Gulls banked toward the Hudson. Pigeons searched for places to land. The sun rose into a clear blue sky, a white sun without warmth that reflected off the snow, and the whole world brightened with the glare. Then Alice awoke. She’d been propped upright in case she vomited again, and when she opened her eyes she opened them wide, looking calmly around at the light-flooded room, blinking once at her husband, recognizing him, then looked away.
“I’m going to change my life,” she said.
David didn’t know what she meant by this or how to react. But at the same time unutterably relieved to see her alive, he simply said, “Yes.” She’d been unconscious for hours but seemed to have spent this time reflecting, having made this decision somewhere in the back of her mind. She was so unwilling to talk to him that morning and for the rest of the day that by evening David gave up trying. She’d been so sick he couldn’t begrudge her anything, yet the longer this went on the more anxious he became. She was angry with him, angry, he knew, for the things he’d said, and every time he recalled their fight, he felt more and more ashamed.
“Alice,” he said the next morning, “I’m so sorry.”
She was watching the television above his head. She lay with her arms crossed, and every time she jabbed the remote at the screen he felt sure the set would fall down on him.
“Sorry for what?”
“For the things I said. For upsetting you so much.”
“Is that what you think?” Alice said.
It was what he thought, but the look of disgust and amazement on her face was so intense that he strongly considered lying.
“You think this happened to me because of our fight? Because of something you might have said?”
“Well,” David answered, “yes.”
She jabbed the remote one, two, three times. “Then you’d be wrong.”
He waited for an explanation, but none came.
“Then why does it seem like you’re angry with me?” he asked.
“Because I’m trapped here, David. And because I am trapped here, I can’t get on with changing my life. Does that make sense to you? Does it make things clear?”
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”
“Well,” Alice said, “that’s just the way it’s going to be for now.”
Her doctor came by on rounds later that evening. When he entered the room, Alice was cordial and talkative, and that she seemed capable of treating this stranger with more decency and kindness than her own husband left David feeling more hurt and confused than before. The doctor checked her heart rate and blood pressure, shined a light in her eyes and examined her tongue. He was Indian, and with his long, delicate fingers—his palms were as pink as smoked chicken—he thumped Alice’s back. And though it was completely irrational, the fact that he was touching her made David horribly jealous.
“Your blood tests came in,” the doctor said. “You’re anemic. You also have acute hyperthyroidism. Were you aware of this condition?”
Alice shook her head.
“When you diet in the future, you must monitor your nutrition more carefully.”
“I will,” she said. “Doctor, may we speak privately for a moment?”
“Certainly.”
Both the doctor and Alice looked over at David and waited. David pointed to himself, then got up and left the room, closed the door behind him, and stood tapping his foot in the hallway.
Within a few minutes, the door opened.
“Thank you so much,” Alice told the doctor.
“Of course,” he said at the door. “You don’t have to suffer like you do.”
They both glanced at David.
“You’ll be discharged tomorrow.”
“That’s wonderful,” Alice said.
“Rest is the best thing for you now,” the doctor said, and after David stepped past him he gently closed the door.
As soon as David took his seat, Alice turned over onto her side and faced away from him.
“Are you going to sleep now?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you make tomorrow come faster?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then the answer is no.”
He sat in the dark for a few minutes, feeling another terrible wave of anxiety come over him. In the next room, a man coughed violently. “Alice?” he said.
She refused to answer.
“I thought I’d lost you. And now that you’re back, it’s like you’re gone.” He could see his wife breathing evenly, calmly, listening to him. “Say something,” he said.
But she’d already fallen asleep.
She slept late the next morning, and when she woke she still wouldn’t engage him. After breakfast, she took a nap. The moment she woke, a nurse came in to check her vitals, and everyone else in the hospital seemed to have an unspoken agreement with Alice that David was to be completely ignored. When the nurse left, another doctor trailed by a group of residents examined her; he explained how Alice had essentially starved herself for so many weeks that her system had gone haywire, her binge coupled with an allergic reaction to certain proteins, the combination having a toxic effect. “What we have here,” the doctor said, “is something akin to kwashiorkor—essentially protein malnutrition—followed by angioedema. A bad combo, to be sure.” The residents nodded, and Alice, happy to help, smiled at them and nodded back. “He’s right,” she said. “I barely ate.” Afterward, a food allergist paid an extended visit. Midday, David went back to the apartment to get her some clean clothes, took a few hours to clean the place spotless, and when he returned, Alice was surrounded by doctors and nurses again. So it wasn’t until late afternoon that she was discharged, she and David sitting in back of the cab, alone together finally, Alice pressed so close to her window and he to his that even a fat person could’ve shared the seat between them, and David picked up the conversation where she’d left off by asking, “How?”
“How what?” she said.
“How are you going to change your life?”
“That’s my business.”
“Oh,” David said. On the street, he watched a man turn the corner onto Lexington Avenue. When the wind hit him, it sent his cap sailing straight into the air. He watched it fly away as hopelessly as a child would a lost balloon. “Are you leaving me?” he asked after awhile.
She closed her eyes, disgusted. “Not everything’s about you, David.”
She continued in this fashion at home. Though the floor was mopped, the bed made with fresh sheets, the seat of the toilet as clean as new china, and you could see your reflection in the fixtures of the sinks, Alice bustled about restraightening everything, shaking her head in frustration as she ran her finger along the baseboards. “This place is filthy,” she said, flashing David her blackened finger. “I can’t live like this.” When he tried to stop her from bleaching the grout in the bathroom, she said, “Can I get myself situated without you following me around?” And so he retreated to sit in front of the television’s blank screen, which he turned on guiltily after a few minutes, sound off. Football wasn’t the same without commentary, the game a set of pointless collisions between enormous men. Commercials were like antic silent movies, the snippets from children’s video games like scenes from some hellish nightmare, even though one of them was David’s own. When Alice entered carrying a bucket and sponge, he couldn’t take it anymore and left for the office. Though in truth there was nothing there for him to do.
So he came back to his book. He brought it up on-screen and read, standing, palms against his desk; then he sat down and fiddled with a sentence or two, reading back to where he’d gotten stuck. And staring at the screen he once again waited, which, as with many things, was often the only thing you could manage to do.
“How are you feeling?” he asked Alice in bed that night.
“I’m fine,” she said, staring at the ceiling with her hands crossed over her chest.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”
“Nothing you want to talk about?”
“No.”
“Nothing you want to tell me?”
