Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [16]
“Thank you so much,” Alice told the doctor.
“Of course,” he said at the door. “You don’t have to suffer like you do.”
They both glanced at David.
“You’ll be discharged tomorrow.”
“That’s wonderful,” Alice said.
“Rest is the best thing for you now,” the doctor said, and after David stepped past him he gently closed the door.
As soon as David took his seat, Alice turned over onto her side and faced away from him.
“Are you going to sleep now?” he asked.
“Yes,” Alice said.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you make tomorrow come faster?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then the answer is no.”
He sat in the dark for a few minutes, feeling another terrible wave of anxiety come over him. In the next room, a man coughed violently. “Alice?” he said.
She refused to answer.
“I thought I’d lost you. And now that you’re back, it’s like you’re gone.” He could see his wife breathing evenly, calmly, listening to him. “Say something,” he said.
But she’d already fallen asleep.
She slept late the next morning, and when she woke she still wouldn’t engage him. After breakfast, she took a nap. The moment she woke, a nurse came in to check her vitals, and everyone else in the hospital seemed to have an unspoken agreement with Alice that David was to be completely ignored. When the nurse left, another doctor trailed by a group of residents examined her; he explained how Alice had essentially starved herself for so many weeks that her system had gone haywire, her binge coupled with an allergic reaction to certain proteins, the combination having a toxic effect. “What we have here,” the doctor said, “is something akin to kwashiorkor—essentially protein malnutrition—followed by angioedema. A bad combo, to be sure.” The residents nodded, and Alice, happy to help, smiled at them and nodded back. “He’s right,” she said. “I barely ate.” Afterward, a food allergist paid an extended visit. Midday, David went back to the apartment to get her some clean clothes, took a few hours to clean the place spotless, and when he returned, Alice was surrounded by doctors and nurses again. So it wasn’t until late afternoon that she was discharged, she and David sitting in back of the cab, alone together finally, Alice pressed so close to her window and he to his that even a fat person could’ve shared the seat between them, and David picked up the conversation where she’d left off by asking, “How?”
“How what?” she said.
“How are you going to change your life?”
“That’s my business.”
“Oh,” David said. On the street, he watched a man turn the corner onto Lexington Avenue. When the wind hit him, it sent his cap sailing straight into the air. He watched it fly away as hopelessly as a child would a lost balloon. “Are you leaving me?” he asked after awhile.
She closed her eyes, disgusted. “Not everything’s about you, David.”
She continued in this fashion at home. Though the floor was mopped, the bed made with fresh sheets, the seat of the toilet as clean as new china, and you could see your reflection in the fixtures of the sinks, Alice bustled about restraightening everything, shaking her head in frustration as she ran her finger along the baseboards. “This place is filthy,” she said, flashing David her blackened finger. “I can’t live like this.” When he tried to stop her from bleaching the grout in the bathroom, she said, “Can I get myself situated without you following me around?” And so he retreated to sit in front of the television’s blank screen, which he turned on guiltily after a few minutes, sound off. Football wasn’t the same without commentary, the game a set of pointless collisions between enormous men. Commercials were like antic silent movies, the snippets from children’s video games like scenes from some hellish nightmare, even though one of them was David’s own. When Alice entered carrying a bucket and sponge, he couldn’t take it anymore and left for the office. Though in truth there was nothing there for him to do.
So he came back to his book. He brought it up on-screen and read, standing, palms against his desk; then he sat down and fiddled