Mr. Peanut, page 7
“Not a bite?” she said.
His resolve weakened slightly. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m late. I have to get to the station.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
He took a final peek in the refrigerator—nothing!—and felt his confidence rise. He was sure this would work! He grabbed the two enormous garbage bags (he felt like the Santa Claus of purloined goods) and left, though all day he wondered what she’d do for sustenance.
“I’m home,” he said that night and then stood for a moment in the foyer. When she didn’t respond he went straight to her bedroom.
Hannah was watching television. “Have you ever noticed,” she said, “how many commercials there are for food? It’s amazing: Milk: It does a body good. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Two whole-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.”
“How about that?”
“A1, it’s how steak is done.”
“Strictly speaking, that’s a condiment.”
“The incredible, edible egg. Beef: It’s what’s for dinner. Yo quiero Taco Bell.”
“There’s one right down the street.”
“There are even commercials for other things with food in them. Fruit of the Loom. Banana Boat sunscreen. Have you noticed?”
“No,” he said.
“Maybe you’re not hungry.”
“I am now,” Hastroll said. His wife’s list had weakened him. “You?”
She shrugged.
Hastroll thought her shoulder blades appeared prominent.
“Say,” she said.
“What?”
“What’s for dinner?”
Hastroll stood up straight and stared out the window. “You’re on your own.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, how about some water?”
“I’m busy,” he said. “Why don’t you get up and get it yourself?”
“Oh, well,” she said and slumped against the headboard.
Hastroll took himself out for Chinese.
Four days into this new strategy, Hannah’s face looked gaunt. Hastroll could see the ribs above her breasts. Seven days, and Hastroll was suffering for her, though he remained determined. He kept close tabs on their garbage for signs of takeout. Zero. She hadn’t eaten a thing. He asked the doorman if he’d seen Hannah leave the building. “To be honest,” Alan said, “I haven’t seen Mrs. Hastroll in so long, I’ve been wondering if she died.” When Hannah said goodnight that night, Hastroll noticed white spittle at the edges of her mouth.
He turned off the bedside lamp and snuck a glance at her in the light from the TV. “What are you watching?” he asked.
“I Shouldn’t Be Alive,” she said.
On the ninth day, she reached for a book on the bedside table, fainted, and landed on the floor.
Hastroll, terrified, revived her with a few slaps, then put her back into bed. “Hannah?” he said. “Hannah, please say something!”
“Water,” she said.
He brought her a glass that she emptied in huge gulps. “Pizza,” she said four glasses later.
He ordered a large pie with pepperoni and extra cheese. She ate six slices without pausing, then sat back, wiped the red stain of sauce from the corners of her mouth and, sleepy with so many carbohydrates, lay back and turned on the TV.
“You still don’t get it,” she said and almost immediately passed out asleep.
“Why, Alice was wonderful with the students,” said Jesslyn Fax, fifty-four, an art teacher at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School for emotionally disturbed and sexually abused teens. “The kids adored her.” A small, dumpy woman, Fax wore a brown dress with a white sweater draped over her shoulders. She had hearing aids in both ears and spoke loudly and cheerily—the permanent optimism, Hastroll thought, of the moderately talented. On her classroom walls were prints of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Guernica, some Monet and Manet, Rothko and Rembrandt, Munch and Mondrian, an Escher or two, all the posters sharing space with charcoals by students, still lifes of fruit and self-portraits, all of them mediocre to bad, the interspersed classics grim reminders of everything the children’s works were not and never would be. There were rows of easels stacked in a corner and barnacled with oil paint, and a large, abstract clay sculpture in the corner of the classroom. “We had a memorial service for her in the gymnasium to help the kids cope with the loss, and Benny Bartlett—you see that dark-haired boy out there?”
Hastroll looked. Bartlett, a heavy-set kid no more than fourteen, was playing basketball with another kid on the court outside. The net on the hoop was made of chain link.
“Why, he spoke about her just beautifully at the service,” she said. “He told everyone the story of how Ms. Pepin taught him how to tell time on a regular clock.”
Hastroll watched the boy for a moment. His own father, a fat, unathletic man, had never played sports with him, and he’d always vowed that when he had a child, he’d be sure to. “Why’s Benny at school here?” Hastroll asked.
“Oh, he’s terribly sick. He’s been badly abused all his life. His uncle molested him for years. His mother’s a crack addict. His father got addicted to meth and flew the coop when he was three. The boy has a third-grader’s IQ. And he raped his sister.”
“I see.”
“But he’s very sweet. That other young man out there, the handsome one, Ralph Smiley?”
He turned to look again. Smiley stole the ball from Bartlett, then stepped to the top of the key, turned around, and shot a basket.
“He was very close to Alice too. She helped him do a very ambitious social studies project on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. You should ask him about that.”
“Why’s Ralph at the school?”
“Since he was a little boy he’s demonstrated sociopathic tendencies. He’s killed a number of cats and dogs in his neighborhood, cut them up into little pieces, and buried the body parts everywhere. Plus he’s a self-flagellator. At any opportunity he takes a razor to his arms and genitals, the poor dear. He’s got stacked rows of keloid scars from his biceps to his wrists. That’s why he’s wearing long sleeves. And his poor little penis looks like the Michelin Man.”
“What subjects did Alice teach here?”
“She taught GED, mostly, and social studies, though her main area of expertise was math.”
“Did you ever meet her husband?”
“David? Such a nice man.”
“Did she ever talk about any marital problems they might’ve had?”
“Not at all.”
“Did she seem depressed in the weeks leading up to her death?”
“Depressed?”
“Withdrawn,” Hastroll said. “Antisocial.”
“She seemed quite exuberant. She’d lost over a hundred and fifty pounds this past year.”
“Thank you, Ms. Fax.” Hastroll stopped at the door. “If you don’t mind my asking, who did that sculpture in the corner?”
Fax turned to look at it. It was three small spheres contained within the gaping hole of a larger one. It loomed. It gave off a hum. It was the only piece in the room that showed any talent.
“Why, Alice did,” Fax said. She covered her mouth and began to cry. “It’s called Hunger.”
He went to Alice’s former classroom. Her weight chart was pinned to the wall, off to the left of the blackboard, a week-to-week bar graph chronicling the whole year, the red construction paper bars marking her progress and climbing steadily like stairs (YOU CAN ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING! it read at the top), one pound lost one week, nine the next, then five, then four. Remarkable. In the drawer of her desk was a picture of the Pepins hugging on a park bench, Alice obese, the couple obviously in love, but the glass shattered in the center as if by a fist. Hastroll picked it up and looked at it, then rummaged around a little.
“Trouble,” someone said.
He looked up. A woman in a nurse’s uniform stood at the classroom door.
“I got a nose for it. I can smell it right here in this room.”
“Who are you?” Hastroll said.
“Who are you?”
He flashed his badge.
“Nurse Ritter,” she said. “I care for the kids here at the school. That is, of course, if you think medicating monsters is care.”
“Did you know Ms. Pepin?”
“Not well,” she said. “But well enough to tell you that girl didn’t commit suicide.” Ritter closed the door and sat down.
Hastroll had to get Hannah out of that room. There had to be a way. If he could lure her out, he decided, he’d rush past her, and lock the door. He tossed ideas around. He thought of releasing a bottle of moths into the room—she hated flapping things, pigeons, moths, bats—but where did you get such a swarm?
He decided to get rid of all their furniture. Not sell it. Literally give it away. Year after year, Hannah had carefully picked each new piece they’d bought. “Better to spend extra and buy something you keep for life,” she’d always said, “than spend a little less and see it out on the street in five years.” (Oh, his practical little wife!) They had many pieces that were of great sentimental value to her. She’d be forced to get out of bed and stop him! He called the Salvation Army. “I have an offer you can’t refuse,” he said. They refused. Or, more accurately, they couldn’t get by his apartment for over a week, and another week of Hannah in bed seemed to him like an eternity. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll give it to someone else then!” He called the Association for Retarded Citizens. A person who sounded retarded answered the phone. “I want to get rid of all my furniture,” Hastroll said.
“Okay,” the person said. “Where do you live?”
“Greenwich Village,” Hastroll said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but we don’t go to Connecticut,” then hung up.
“Who are you on the phone with?” Hannah said from the bedroom.
“No one!” Hastroll yelled.
“Jeez Louise,” Hannah said, “somebody’s in a bad mood.”
He called Finders Keepers, a consignment store, but when he listed everything he had—a sofa, an easy chair, a television set, a stereo, silverware, stemware, flatware, pots and pans, four lamps, a coffeemaker, a chandelier, a desk, a dining room set, a buffet, books, a machete and a saw, not a single piece in poor condition “and all of it,” Hastroll explained loudly, “of exceptional quality”—they said they were sorry, they were stocked up on all those items. He called the homeless shelters and the Boys & Girls Club of America, but they didn’t need his stuff. He called Goodwill, but they didn’t do pickups. Finally, out of desperation, he drove to Alphabet City, went up to the first two suspicious-looking thugs he could find, arrested them, and hustled them into his car, gently pressing their heads down as they got in. He explained the situation—“You will take all of my furniture, and I’ll pay for the transportation”—and brought them back to his apartment.
The men, Roscoe and Lee Browne, stepped inside and looked around. “Shoo,” Roscoe said.
“Shoo what?”
“This is a setup is what this is,” the man said.
“This is way too good to be true,” said Browne.
“This isn’t a setup,” Hastroll said. “It isn’t too good to be true. This is charity.”
“Maybe we don’t need no charity,” said Roscoe.
“This is charity for me.”
The two men looked at each other, shook their heads pityingly, and both went, “Tssss.”
“Maybe we don’t like your shit,” Browne finally said.
“Please,” Hastroll said, “take it. I’m begging you. Or you’re under arrest.”
They began to carry the furniture out the door.
“What’s going on out there?” Hannah said.
“Nothing,” Hastroll said. “I’m just giving our furniture away.”
“Oh,” Hannah said.
“That’s right,” Hastroll said. “It’s out of here!”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Come on, Ward,” she said. “You’re kidding.”
“See for yourself.”
In the pause that followed, he rushed to the bedroom door, ready to pounce.
“No,” she said. “I believe you.”
Roscoe dropped her favorite lamp, and it shattered. Browne took down the picture she’d painted of Hastroll’s rose garden and dropped that too, the frame falling apart.
“It sounds like they’re really working hard,” she said.
“You can’t believe it,” Hastroll said. “They’re like a pair of thieves.”
“I can hear all that space,” she said. “It almost sounds like a cave in there.”
“It’s like being in an empty stadium.”
“It must be like when we were a young couple.”
“Back when we were broke.”
“Like when we had nothing,” she said.
“Right, when we first got married.”
“You had a futon,” Hannah said. “And you drank out of empty yogurt containers.”
Hastroll smiled, pressing his palm to the door. “That’s right.”
“But you kept your bathroom so clean.”
“Come on out and feast your eyes. It’s a trip down memory lane!”
The bed creaked, and Hastroll’s heart jumped. Then silence.
“Did they take the love seat?” Hannah said finally.
“They did.”
“What about the dining room table?”
Hastroll winced as the men dinged the jamb with one of the legs.
“It’s gone.”
“Does the place seem roomier now?”
“You’ve got to see it to believe it.”
Hastroll, thinking he heard her move, rushed to the door again.
“No,” she said. “I think I’ll stay where I am.”
Hastroll rested his forehead against the door.
After a minute, she said, “Ward?”
“What?”
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“For getting rid of all that stuff.”
“Why are you thanking me?”
“Because now I won’t have to clean it.”
He gave the men forty bucks each and made them bring everything back upstairs.
“Something suspicious happened,” Nurse Ritter had told Hastroll, “on the day Alice died.”
Ritter was a tough little cookie, a Brooklyn girl like Georgine Darcy and proud of it. Her father was a fullback for the New York Giants, she’d told him, and though she was diminutive she possessed the same bluntness necessary to knock things out of her path.
“David, her husband,” she said, “he shows up here at school, out of the blue, all sweaty and stressed. Agitated. Says he’s got to talk with her. As in right now. You’re wondering why I know this. Well,” she said, “my office, it’s right next door to Alice’s classroom. Anyway, they have this big fight—like a pair of pit bulls ripping each other’s throats out in some tenement basement in the Bronx.”
“You’re saying things turned violent?”
“No, it’s just a figure of speech. But he grabbed her arm.”
“Could you hear what were they saying?”
“So far as I could tell, they were fighting about a vacation.”
“Do you remember what they said?”
“I remember it like I remember the first thing my husband said to me on our wedding night after we made love for the very first time.”
“Go on,” Hastroll said.
“He said, ‘Christ, Thelma, I thought you was a virgin.’”
“I meant the Pepins.”
“Oh,” she said. “Something about leaving for Australia that night, dropping everything else. They didn’t even need to pack, he says, which is crazy, she says. But then while they’re arguing, I start thinking to myself. Why does a husband all of a sudden show up and demand his wife go somewhere with him? Because he’s up to no good, I says. Running from something.”
Hastroll paused to clean his glasses. “What happened after their argument?”
“Alice just stormed outside. David, he went and sat in his car like he was staking her out. But then he got a call on his phone and was all upset again.”
“Upset how?”
“Jumpy. Fidgety. Like one of those towel-head kiosk owners when you look at their magazines.”
“And then?”
“The kids, they was loading up the buses for a school trip Alice was taking them on. She boards the bus, and then he follows right behind in their car. And the next day, what do I hear”—her voice cracked—“but that she’s dead.”
She shook her head. “Trouble,” she said, blowing into a tissue. “I got a nose for it.”
Hastroll hadn’t had sex with his wife in five months.
True, there had been periods when he and Hannah had lived together like a pair of monks, but this current streak broke all records. A powerful horniness had come over him. For a while he sustained himself on a steady diet of masturbation, shocking himself by how proficient and stealthy he’d become. He beat off in the shower, using Hannah’s expensive conditioner for lubrication. He ejaculated into the toilet, after which he took a long, constricted, slightly sore pee. He jerked off in bed, within seconds after Hannah fell asleep, shorts down and knees up, legs forming what he liked to call his little tent of pleasure. Oddly, his panopticon of playthings never included Hollywood stars—who were they to an unglamorous detective?—but were always centered on women he knew. Recently, he’d spent much of his fantasy life screwing Georgine Darcy to tears. His questioning of her had formed the concrete basis of his fantasies and in his favorite one he came home to find her in his apartment. The bitch was robbing them, stealing Hannah’s jewelry, and he discovered her as she was trying to beat a retreat.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Why, Detective Hastroll,” she said. “I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by to tell you something suspicious I’d rememered about David, and the door was open, so I came in and saw your wife’s jewelry and just had to try it on, but I guess I’ll be going.”
He grabbed her by her wrist and threw her down on the couch. “You’re not going anywhere!”
She tried to get up and they wrestled, but he threw her down on the couch again, immediately growing an erection Georgine noticed, putting the back of her hand to her forehead and staring at Hastroll’s prodigious lump. “Help!” she whispered, and kicked off her shoes. “Help, police!” He lifted up the skirt of her dress and saw—my god!—that she had garters on but no underwear. Her bush was narrow and perfectly trimmed, a strip of yellow mink as blond as a towheaded child’s hair.
