Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [169]
She went to the bathroom to weigh herself, her hair covering her face as she stared at the scale’s readout—“One eighty-eight,” she said. Then she put on a dress, tied a ponytail, and went to the kitchen, with Pepin in tow. She stood by the refrigerator, smiling as he snapped the shot, Pepin shaking out the square of film the Polaroid camera tongued from its housing, the slow emergence of the image from white to yellow to the mood-ring shades of blues and greens so much more satisfying than anything digital or instantaneous, until finally, as if in reward for the wait, there was this new Alice, whom the two of them admired together, her face awash with the flash. Rolling a piece of tape into a loop, she stuck it on the back, which she stuck in turn in the upper left half of the refrigerator’s door.
“I’ll be back,” she said; then she left for the day.
Alone again, David wrote with the same quiet, bullet-train speed he’d been composing with since he’d arrived at the novel’s apex, a summit crossed in blackest night. He didn’t know how much he had left, exactly, though he had a clear sense of the movements required, of the book’s final shape. En route to the conclusion it split into a series of penultimates, all of them viable, only one of them definitive, circling back finally to the beginning, just as the book’s form demanded. As for the end itself, all he knew for sure was that he was getting there quickly.
She was waiting with Chinese for dinner after he returned from his run. Eating with Alice now was something that required an adjustment. Her portions were positively Lilliputian, measured out in thimblefuls. Course to course, he had to eat fast in order to keep up. In contrast to his bowl of wonton soup (with two dumplings) she poured herself a ramekin (with half a dumpling) that she might as well have drunk like a shot. On his plate he piled lo mein, lemon chicken, beef with broccoli, and white rice—she was back and he was hungry again, so why not?—whereas on a saucer she fit a miniature version of the same. To call hers dinner would be a misnomer, since with her new, peanut-sized stomach she daily ate nine of these minimeals. Yet like Alice herself, with each day the portions seemed to shrink in size. Meanwhile, Pepin gorged.
“The more I disappear, the less I eat. Maybe soon I won’t eat at all.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You shower,” she said, “while I clean up.”
“Then?”
“Then we go to bed.”
Admittedly, the prospect frightened him. He stood in the shower, arms crossed, waiting. It had been so long since he and Alice had made love that he was afraid he wouldn’t know how; or, worse, that she’d feel no desire for him, which fear reminded him of the months following her miscarriages when even an attempt to hold her in the night made her moan in pain and his only choice was to withdraw every extremity—stomach to cock, head to toe to soul—until he was contracted in a carapace of solitude, his heart hulled in and indefinitely encased, when he didn’t have to imagine touching her at all. He was also afraid that when she tried to kiss him he might recoil.
Once he was out of the shower, a towel around his neck and another hooked at his waist, she took him by the hand, pulled him toward the bed, and sat down. When he gave a slight tug against her weight, like a fish’s sampling of bait, she stood up, took one end of the towel around his neck, and slid it off. The little hairs sprouting all over his chest were like the bristles on a fly. She pulled away the towel at his waist. He stood limp, relaxed, though when she leaned closer he tensed to be tickled, to fall fetal, thinking he might burst into tears. He closed his eyes so tightly that the muscles felt taut in his cheeks. He heard Alice step out of her dress, her bra unsnap, her panties hiss down her thighs, and then she kissed him. He had to consciously relax his lips and mouth, to suppress the powerful urge to snap-jaw her tongue.