Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [156]
The tea kettle whistled.
He threw the covers off himself and went into the kitchen, where she was sitting at the table, her hands wrapped around a cup of green tea, waiting for him.
“We need to talk,” she said.
It took all his wind. He put his hands on the table and, like an elderly man, pressed his weight against the top while he eased himself down.
Alice tucked her hair behind her ear. Her eyes welled up and she cleared her throat. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said, wiping a tear with her palm. “I’ve been so torn up about this for so long that I’ve kept away for our own protection. But I can’t go on like this any longer. I can’t keep it to myself anymore.”
David’s heart was pounding.
“We’re in a rut,” she said.
So utterly relieved for a moment, he asked her to repeat what she’d just said.
“A rut,” she said. “But that’s not the right word. It’s worse. Crisis might be closer, but that suggests we have a choice to make, and I can’t figure out what the choice is between.”
She took a sip of her tea, concentrating, her focus drifting inward. She looked fitter than ever. She had a nice color in her cheeks; tone, if you could call it that, in her thick shoulders and arms.
“Stuck might be it too, but I don’t know if there’s a converse. If we get unstuck, I don’t know if we’re better off. Bored might be a little closer, but I know there’s something we could do.”
She reached out to touch his cheek.
“Can’t you feel it?” she said. “Where we are? It’s like limbo but without being dead. It’s like everything’s the opposite of the way it should be. Now that we know each other better than ever, we don’t know each other at all. Now that we’ve grown closer to each other than to anyone else, we’ve grown farther apart. I can’t really describe it. But if we stay like this for much longer, I think I’d rather die.”
“Don’t say that,” David said.
“Am I really alone here?”
“No.”
“So the question I’ve been trying to answer,” she said, “is what to do about it.”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
“Do you have any ideas?”
He thought of Georgine. “You first.”
“Do you ever think maybe we should live our life from here on out like an experiment?” she said. “Treat our marriage like the moon shot, like space exploration? The final frontier! I know I’m being vague, but think about it. Why do we live here, for instance, and not somewhere else? Why not dedicate our lives to living in every one of the United States? To eradicating world hunger? Raising free-range chickens in the French countryside? How about we become marine biologists and study the Great Barrier Reef? I don’t even know what it is. It’s because I’ve been so busy with me. I’m so busy with me I’m dumb. I want to unlearn me. How about we hike the Appalachian Trail?”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m serious,” she said, “though those are still the wrong examples. But what are we afraid of, David? What’s holding us back?”
“From what?”
“From whatever we’re not feeling. From whatever we’re not doing.”
“What aren’t we feeling or doing?”
“More.”
“I feel like I feel plenty. I feel like I don’t want to feel any more.”
She nodded. “I understand what you’re saying, but you’re talking about the last few months. You’re still not understanding me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What if we thought of our marriage as an experiment in the achievement of mutual bliss?” she said. “What if we vowed, I don’t know, to fuck every day—like some kooky Guinness stunt but with no interest in breaking any records? I don’t mean just hump. I mean dedicate a certain period of time every day to giving each other some novel form of pleasure.”
“Are you saying our sex is bad?”
“I’m saying we need the new, David. We need New Zealand or Newfoundland. A new state of affairs. A new world. What?” she said. “What is it?” David had covered his eyes.
“I agree,” he said, shaking his head.
“But what?”
But why, after he’d been fucked cross-eyed by another woman, did Alice want to reinvent fucking? Why, after desperate