Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [158]
“What does that mean?”
“That we forge ahead.”
“Toward what?”
“Something new,” she said. “Somewhere new. Tomorrow. Let’s just go.”
“Like where?”
“You pick.”
“I’ll leave this one to you.”
“All right. I, for one, have always wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Oh,” he said, “Australia.”
“The land down under.”
“Or should we call it Oz?”
“Please,” she said. “This is our chance.”
He stood up, leaned against the stove, and stuffed his hands under his arms. This was silly, he thought. It was unreality. The reality was that he’d slept with another woman tonight and wanted to sleep with her again. Oh, to have light little Georgine spinning on him like a top! What would Alice say if he told her that? How exciting would their experiment be if he told her he’d already started one? Didn’t that prove there could be no experiment?
“We can do anything,” Alice said. “We love each other.”
“Anything?”
“Anything we want.”
“Well, right now I want to go to sleep.” He felt so terribly disengaged and tired with their life together that he could barely bring himself to walk down the hall.
“I know you don’t believe me,” she said, “so I’m going to show you.”
“Yes,” David said, “you do that.”
The next morning he woke in the middle of the bed, stretched across it diagonally, and for a blessed moment he thought his conversation with his wife was something he’d dreamed. He sat up, then recalled Georgine bucking above him and wondered if that was a dream too. But it wasn’t. Sunlight flooded the bedroom, though not brightly enough to annihilate his regrets. It was windy outside, brilliant and clear, too beautiful a day to feel so terrible.
He called his wife’s name but the only reply was the refrigerator’s motor shuddering to life. He looked at the clock. It was almost eight thirty. He could smell acrid, bottom-of-carafe coffee, so he went to the kitchen and made a new pot. He thought about Georgine and felt no small degree of shame, then wondered how he might handle what had happened between them: best to end things immediately, have a talk over lunch, say, and be done with it. Though another part of him was wondering what he should wear today and what her reaction would be when she saw him, because he was so excited to see her he couldn’t wait to get in to work. And another part of him was so mortified that he thought about calling in sick for the rest of the week or going somewhere new like Alice had suggested, remote, out of cell phone or e-mail range, like the Congo.
Alice’s note was propped against the coffeemaker.
David,
I’m leaving for a while. I was going to tell you about this last night, but after our talk I didn’t feel like you’d understand and might try to stop me. There’s a chance I may not return and that terrifies me. If things work out that way, I promise you’ll get an explanation.
Please think about what I said—or don’t. But no matter what, I want you to live as if I was gone for good—as if I’d died and you were allowed to start your life over again. Or start a life without me now.
Understand this is all part of the experiment.
Please don’t try to find me. No one knows where I’ve gone. When I came back from the hospital a few months ago, I told you I was going to change my life, and this is the first step.
Remember: purpose without procedure.
I love you,
Alice
Reading her note a second time, David was surprised at his lack of emotion—perhaps because he didn’t believe a word of it. There’s a chance I may not return and that terrifies me. Please, he thought. This was yet another go-around of some kind and Alice would be back—maybe by tonight. He imagined her showing up at their door—a search through her closet revealing she hadn’t even taken a suitcase—with her head hung low, embarrassed or perhaps even angry with him over her newest failure. “Don’t say it,” she’d say, and he wouldn’t, and she’d go back to the bedroom and begin the period of waiting for both of them