Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [161]
Maybe give her idea a try, he thought, then asked himself what he felt restricted by.
His book. Unfinished, his book consumed his life.
He wanted to finish it but didn’t know how to. He hadn’t a clue as to how it ended. Throw it away, Alice had said; trash it. But then the fact that the book had been abandoned incomplete would gnaw at him forever. Even Alice should have known that. David remembered what she’d told him at the doctor’s after her third miscarriage—that she’d most likely never be able to carry a child to term. “Nothing sticks to my insides,” she’d said to the doctor, and wept. But the worst part, she told David later, wasn’t that they’d never be able to have children. No, it was that she constantly thought about the children she hadn’t been able to have. “I think about those little peanuts all the time,” she said.
He had to finish the book and be done with it. Be done with it, and a whole new world would open before him: the world without his book.
He had to finish it but didn’t know how to. He didn’t know what happened next. And the only way of knowing this was to have it happen.
Perplexed, he got up from his chair and went to the cupboard and got down a can of peanuts from his secret stash of forbidden foods. He poured out a handful and ate them and then wiped the salt from his empty hand on his pants. He looked at the chipper Planters Peanuts man tipping his top hat hello and thought about how one bite could kill Alice dead.
Of course! David thought.
But now he had to find her!
No denying it, his wife was a smart woman, but he didn’t think she could disappear without a trace. Yet, after a search through her desk and the discovery of her laptop (hard drive erased), it seemed she’d done just that.
Convinced there must be a clue in the apartment, he began to turn the place over. Not sure what he was looking for, he started in her closet. From the top shelves he brought down all the boxes of her old clothes and rifled through them, occasionally taking breaks to sniff the fabric that still smelled of Alice, remembering her wearing a particular outfit, the countless mornings before she left for work when she modeled one, after she’d stamped her foot to get his attention, so that he could take in her whole frame, and said, “How does this look?” as if she needed him to see her in order for her to see herself. He searched through her piles of sweaters and T-shirts and multitiered shelves of shoes, Alice preferring pumps to heels, David thinking of her feet, fat long before she was, not a bone visible in them, and her ankles fat too. “I have my father’s feet,” she used to say woefully. “If we have girls, I hope they get yours.” He mulled over old photos of her family and of Alice as a child, two-by-three-inch prints, the dates printed in the border, their color washed out with time, the pixilation pitiful compared to cameras today, a focus that seemed Seurat-soft, the focus of dreams, of memory, David realizing, sadly, how few stories of her childhood he knew or, even more sadly, how few happy stories of her childhood she had. In one, age five, perhaps, in polo shirt and jeans, her chestnut hair so short she looked like a little boy, she was by the lake with her golden retriever, famous in her mind and special in her heart for saving her whenever she climbed the picket fence in her backyard, Princess leaping over it to trot after her, take her wrist in her own soft mouth, and lead her back home, and who, because she barked so much (not allowed inside the house), was one day sent away, as Alice would be later, by her father. David found old photos of Alice and himself that he’d forgotten, and he could see in their expressions that they’d once been happy; and in their