Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [13]
“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,