Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [168]
“Hello?” the voice said.
It was Alice.
Pepin sat there until she found him. But for the light shining from above the table, all the lights were off in the apartment.
She stepped into the beam the fixture cast. She stopped when she got close. “What happened to you?” she said.
He couldn’t speak at the sight of her. It had been over nine months since she’d disappeared. She looked radiant, tan. She’d colored her hair ash-blond, or the sun had. She’d lost, he guessed, over a hundred pounds.
“I changed,” he finally said.
“Clearly.”
“You changed too.”
She held her arms out, then let them fall. “You had that surgery,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, pulling up her blouse. There was a long pink scar, the pink of seashell, across her stomach.
“Will you stay here?” he said.
“For a while. Until you’re finished.”
“I understand,” he said. “I’d like that.”
She came over to him and put her arm around his neck, her palm on his bald scalp. She looked over his shoulder at the pages he was working on, then flipped through all those he’d written thus far. “You’re almost done,” she said.
“Almost to the end.”
“Are you coming to bed soon?”
“Yes.”
She kissed his forehead. “Good.”
This close to her, he could smell her scent of the sea.
And then one day, David wrote, Alice began to lose weight.
He’d seen her drop pounds before, but perhaps because of her failed attempts in the past, her progress seemed more remarkable this time; or perhaps because they’d been apart for nine months it all seemed new, but never had he witnessed the kind of transformation she was undergoing now. Every morning there seemed less of her, a thinness visible in the cheekbones, a concavity in the belly, and a deflation of ass that Alice herself remarked on in the mirror with the indifference of a magician who knew the secret to her trick.
She talked to his reflection as he lay there in bed. “You look surprised,” she said.
“I am,” he said.
“I am too.” She turned her body to face him but kept her face to the mirror, looking at her back.
He stared at the crescent scar across her belly. “You’re doing beautifully,” he said.
“There’s still a ways to go.”
It was true. Although her weight loss bordered on the frantic and he was afraid to blink lest he miss some new aspect of this werewolf-to-wife transformation, there were aftershocks and wreckage, places on her body so stretched out—her triceps hanging from her arms like the edges of spun pizza dough, a roll around her waist like a sweater’s ends bunched belly to back—that no amount of exercise could tone, smooth, or retract. Only surgery could fix this. They’d have to flense her like the blubber from a whale.
“My skin,” she said wonderingly, “is like a space suit that’s too big.” She couldn’t leave the mirror, turning from side to side as if her nakedness were a new dress. “And yet it’s the oddest thing,” she said. “I feel like I’m not dieting anymore. If the doctors could just remove all my skin, they’d find me. Do you get it?”
“I do,” he said.
“It didn’t used to be like that.”
Suddenly he found himself very emotional.
She was still Alice, this Alice-not-Alice. Her smile was the same, her little tics were yet in full effect, but there was a corresponding secretly won confidence that came somehow with her lightness, her nine-month odyssey, and made her seem miraculous, a mystery—not to be solved, mind you, just loved. He could wait to hear all the details.
She turned to look at him now, tucked her hair behind her ears, and came toward him on the bed, crawling on all fours to where she could kiss him, which she did. “I’ll weigh myself and then I want you to take a picture of me. And then you write.”
The emotions Pepin had kept quelled rose to the surface. “I don’t want to write,” he said.
Alice took his chin in her hand, raised his