Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [160]
One night—four months now, maybe five; it was January and he counted backward—he even convinced Georgine to come home with him. His wife, he said, not untruthfully, wouldn’t be back until very late. It was a risk, he admitted, standing at the door, but he wanted them to have sex in his own bed. He’d never felt hornier in his life. When they entered, he called out Alice’s name.
“Jesus,” Georgine said, “is she here?”
“I don’t know,” he told her, practically laughing. Unsure they were alone, he showed Georgine inside quietly, careful to leave the front door ajar. To set the mood, he turned on the stereo, raising the volume loud enough to be unable to hear Alice come in unannounced. In spite of Georgine’s protests, he left the bedroom door wide open as they undressed. Then, in knots so complicated they’d be impossible to undo quickly, he tied her wrists to the bedposts with two of the ties Alice had given him for past birthdays. Ties, he thought as he dropped his pants, when the fuck do I wear ties?
“You’re positive she won’t show up?” Georgine said. She was honestly scared.
“No,” he told her, scared himself. “I’m really not.” And he made love to Georgine angrily and passionately, right in plain sight, as if Alice had been there to see.
Where had Alice gone?
True, he thought, as five months became six and seven and winter became spring, he’d been unfaithful and had to call things off with Georgine immediately. True, he and Alice were in some kind of rut, or crisis, or limbo, or unnameable terrible place. But this stunt she’d pulled wasn’t funny anymore! They never had spent such a long stretch apart, and although he didn’t miss his wife at all and was still very, very glad she’d decided to take this break or hiatus, the thing that was driving him crazy about her little experi-vacation, or her disappearance of self-discovery, was that he had no idea what to do with all of this goddamn time!
Of course, it was the perfect opportunity to get some writing done, he realized, and by the beginning of May, the ninth month, he finally took his manuscript out of the box and read the pages leading up to where he’d gotten stuck. He looked them over again and again until he came to the same dead end. Being in the middle of a novel was like being trapped inside a tangled ball of yarn. It was different than designing a game. A game’s players could enjoy infinite variations of action, but the lines of code, albeit vast, were limited. You were building a kind of wind-up toy that you too could see go. Once you’d written yourself into the middle of a novel, however, it seemed it could grow and grow around you. He stared at the page and waited and then stared some more. It was so peaceful now, so perfect with the house quiet and the world calm, but with Alice absent, his concentration was shot, his imagination dead. It was as if the book suddenly lost all importance and had no reason to come into existence. He sat at their kitchen table and looked at one page for so long that the page disappeared, and his thoughts turned back to their last conversation and his wife’s idea of living as if they were an experiment—as purpose without procedure. He didn’t know what she meant, exactly, but he did know that the process of writing fiction was purpose without procedure. You felt some sort of resolution or ending luring you forward but had no idea really how to actually arrive at it, though you had to get there nonetheless. Life, when you came right down to it, was like that too. Oh, the psychologists and philosophers, the politicians and priests, posited paths for you, but how often did people, in spite of all this advice, really feel sure of their way? Didn’t think someone else knew something that they didn’t? Was on to something better than you were? Was on the right road while you raced into oblivion? Was this