Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [152]
The phone.
He turned on the light by his nightstand, rubbed his eyes, looked at his watch. It was 4:15.
“Sir,” the guard said. “It’s Mobius.”
“What happened?”
“He’s dead.”
“Dead?” Sheppard sat up. “How?”
“Asphyxiation.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He choked to death, sir.”
“On what?”
“I can’t say a hundred percent. The paramedics are finishing up now. But it looks like he blocked his windpipe swallowing pages from that novel.”
But the middle, David wrote, is long and hard.
He meant his book and he meant his marriage. At some point his book had become his marriage, or consumed his marriage. Or else his marriage had consumed his book. Did real writers suffer such problems? He certainly didn’t consider himself one. Real writers kept the boundaries between art and life clear, didn’t they? Knew dreams from days. They had to. Otherwise, how could they discern the arc of a story or recognize their themes? Ride narrative logic like a wave, from swell to shore. His book had become something entirely different. It wasn’t a story anymore. It was him. It was Alice. It was them.
His book had become an act of cannibalism.
In the five years since her miscarriages, he and Alice had lived the same routine with minor deviations, and he hadn’t made a lick of progress on his book. He hadn’t written himself into a corner: he’d written himself into a round. His book and his marriage had become a long wait for something to happen.
So he welcomed this recent turn of events. True, he hadn’t needed her to be hospitalized for them to come about, but now Alice was going to change her life! He wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but chances were it was something new.
In the meantime, however, she remained remote, quick to temper and slow to warm; they hadn’t made love in months. Sometimes, when he came home, he caught her on the phone, which quietly she hung up. “Who was that?” he’d asked. “No one,” she’d say. And they left it at that. Her laptop was off-limits. Her cell phone bill was, of late, nowhere to be found. Her bank and credit card statements were gone. She was going off the grid. She often worked late. She went to suspicious meetings about which she told him nothing, wearing full-on makeup and her nicest clothes. “What’s all this?” he’d asked. “What’s what?” she’d say. He regarded her for a moment. How much weight had she lost? Twenty pounds? Thirty? None at all? He couldn’t say she looked good, just less. But less, in Alice’s case, was still more. Was she having an affair?
“I’m going to the gym,” Alice told him one day.
He watched from the peephole until she was on the elevator, then rushed down the eight flights of stairs. He followed her east, toward Third Avenue, where she signaled for a taxi and landed one immediately. But when David tried to hail one, there were none to be found.
They never have these problems in movies, he thought, giving up.
He called a car service the next day and instructed the driver to wait on Third. But leaving the building she turned left toward Lexington, their one-way street headed east, and by the time the car made it around the block, Alice was gone.
He called two car services the next day, had one car waiting on Third, the other on Lex, canceling the latter once she headed east.
“Follow that cab,” he told the driver.
“Seriously?” the man said.
“Just do your fucking job, all right?”
Characters in movies never have to park either, and if they do, there’s always a space. If they’re in a rush, they never have to start a PC. There were never delays. In the plots, no time was ever wasted, and why was that?
She got out at the Y.
Why, for that matter, did every Y smell the same? That particular brand of human humidity, of