Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [157]
Alice took his wrists and uncovered his eyes. “Look,” she said, “what if we wrote down everything in our lives we felt restricted by and vowed to help each other become unrestricted.”
“You mean sexually?”
“Sexually, spiritually. Physically, spatially. Sure, sexually for starters.”
“Are you saying you want to sleep with other people?”
“Are you?” Alice took his hands in hers again and squeezed them. They were warm from her tea and his were cold. “Do you want to take a lover, David? In a way, that’s what I’m getting at. Take a lover and tell me all about it. Or don’t. But you get what you want because I free you to get it. I’ll help you get it and then you help me.”
“I don’t want a lover,” he said. It was a lie, though as it applied to what Alice was saying, it was true.
“You must want something,” she said.
It was a desire that had haunted him ever since he’d started his book, but instead of saying what it was, he said, “What do you want?”
“Oh.” Still holding his hands, she leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I want … to be a cannibal in Papua New Guinea and learn how to shrink a head. I want to ride a camel in the desert and see a mirage and then find water there. I want to join a cult and be deprogrammed and then I want to become a deprogrammer. I want to feel what it feels like to spend an unlimited amount of cash until I don’t have a dime to my name. I want to be shipwrecked on a desert island for years and build huts with elevators like the Swiss Family Robinson.” Pulling at his hands, she lowered her head and faced him. “I want,” she said, “to make you impossibly happy.”
David could barely keep his head up, he was so distraught. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say ‘yes.’ Say ‘When can we start?’”
“When can we start?” he said sadly.
“Right now,” she said, and smacked the table. “Could you walk away from Spellbound?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have to live in New York?”
“No.”
“Tell me, when are you going to finish your book?”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Your book. That you’ve been working on.”
“How the hell do you know about that?”
“Well, I saw some pages on your desk one day, but I only read a few words. It’s none of my business.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Have you finished?”
“No.”
“Can I ask why?”
“I don’t know how it ends.”
“Trash it,” she said. “Burn it. Throw it away.”
“No,” David said. He dropped her hands.
“Then go off somewhere. Just finish it. If I knew you were doing that, if I knew you had the end in sight, maybe I’d know what I was waiting for.”
“I don’t need to go away to finish it.”
“But you do need to finish, right? We do. This is what I mean. If it holds you back, if it keeps us apart, if it weighs you down—like my weight does me—then go. Or let it go. Then I can go too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Don’t say you don’t, because you’re smarter than that.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I mean, you’re the smartest man I know.”
“You act like we can both just change. You act like all you have to do is snap”—he snapped his fingers—“and it’s done. Like your whole life is something you can throw off. But it isn’t. We can’t.”
“Yes we can.”
“You haven’t been able to.”
“I know,” Alice said. “But I was afraid. I’m not afraid anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” she said, “there’s nothing after us.”
It was true. Without children, their marriage was only about each other. It had never occurred to him before, but now that she’d said it, he realized it was something he’d been afraid to admit.
“I’m not sad about that anymore,” she said. “I’m not even mad. In fact, now I think it’s what makes us special. Singular. You’re the only way I see the world. You’re it. I know it sounds romantic, but that’s how much I love you. I can’t imagine you gone.”
“But you’re the one who’s been gone!”
“I know,” she said, nodding. “That’s why I know. So, I propose an experiment: us. We