Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [159]
He decided not to give the matter any more thought. Meanwhile, he concluded, he had to end things with Georgine as quickly as possible, so in the shower, he rehearsed what he was going to tell her, and how, and where, and he took extra time shaving and grooming and tried on three different shirts before heading into the office. Walking to the subway, he called Alice’s cell phone. A recording explained that the number wasn’t in service, and this news annoyed him. It was just like her previous diets. He could see himself calling their cell phone company when she returned by week’s end, paying a reconnection fee, maybe even having to buy another phone. On the platform, he stood near the yellow line as the train came barreling down the tracks. Against the cars’ reflection, he could clearly make out the frown on his face before the train gradually halted before him. It would be the same thing as her teaching, he thought. When she’d left Trinity midyear, it made getting another job nearly impossible—thus Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School for the emotionally disturbed. But that wasn’t his problem anymore.
No, if Alice can take a holiday from me, David thought, running his hand up Georgine’s leg as she stood behind his desk, then I can take a holiday from her. The office door was open and he and Georgine pretended to work while he touched her, feeling his way past her panties, the both of them gone quiet, Georgine radiating heat and her eyes half-closing.
“When,” she whispered, “can we get out of here?”
Later, on the rear balcony of Georgine’s Greenwich Village apartment, drinking orange juice out of the carton, David felt like a convict who’d made it safely across the border. Why even give Alice a thought? Why not take her up on her offer and live as if she were gone for good? He could hear Georgine humming pitch-perfectly in the bathroom while she dressed to the sound of a piano playing across the courtyard. From his perch, he watched the songwriter in the apartment to his left play a few chords on his piano and then make notes with a pencil he kept behind his ear, the old man in the apartment with him—a cowriter, perhaps—nodding approvingly while he wound the clock on his mantel. David nodded as well. The music, he thought, was like a soaring love song about freedom! He himself felt free and young again, and a keen sense of surprise about everything at the moment—this view, for example, and his newfound sex partner, in fact his whole life! He felt capable of remarkable, undreamed-of things, the bones of his new wings—humerus, ulna, radius, and manus—springing from his back and spreading wide in the bright sun. Was this the new world Alice was talking about? The new state of affairs? Or had his body and mind been transformed only because she was gone?
Alice didn’t come home that night. Or the next night, or the following—nights that soon turned into a week and then into two. Initially, David was untroubled by his wife’s absence, though out of habit he called out her name whenever he came home. There was a novelty to his solitude, plus the apartment was all his. He could order in and not take the garbage out. He could eat anything he wanted and catch any movie on a whim. And conversely, her desertion made him feel her presence acutely. It was like a tug-of-war between perfectly matched opponents, a stalemate that wouldn’t end until one side grew exhausted and let go—and he wasn’t about to do that. He was going to ride this out. He was going to hold on. He was going to be here when she came back. And she was coming back.
Two weeks turned into a month—October now—which turned into two. To pass the time, he kept himself occupied with Georgine, but it was strange. As time wore on, he needed to pretend that Alice might show up any second for their trysts to remain hot. If the phone rang in his office while Georgine was blowing him, he had to convince himself it was Alice calling from the front desk. If his cell phone rang while he and Georgine were in a hotel, he made her answer it while he was