Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [170]
She, in turn, persisted gently, feeding quietly and calmly, like a cat lapping water from a bowl. “Kiss me,” she whispered.
They kissed, and it was like a watching a sand castle washed over by a wave: merlons of the parapets melted to crenels, turrets toppled and gun slits collapsed, the ramparts sliding into the sea.
“Alice, I missed you so.”
They lay together later, staring up at the ceiling and holding hands.
“How did you get to the end?” she said.
He wrote about the beginning.
They met in a film class, Marriage and Hitchcock.
It was all purely chance. His master’s in computer science required that David take a couple of liberal arts classes—he’d put it off—and in his last semester this was one of only three courses with openings; another was called Feminism and Schizophrenia in the Fifties, and the other, a seminar in the works of Italo Calvino, meant nothing to him, though the graduate student at the registration desk raved about the author and jotted down a list of his books. Somehow, David had never seen a single Hitchcock film. He was fluent in the famous images from specials and tributes on TV and montages on the Academy Awards—the woman being attacked in the phone booth by seagulls in The Birds, Jimmy Stewart lowering the telephoto lens from his eye in Rear Window, Janet Leigh getting stabbed to death in the shower in Psycho—but knew none of the stories. He’d missed a whole era, and suddenly it felt like a terrible gap. Given the course requirements, it also seemed like a breeze: one term paper and regular attendance for screenings and discussions. Watching movies and talking about them, he thought, wasn’t education, just recreation. Yet these films would change how he saw everything, just as seeing Alice for the first time would change his life.
The class was held in a large amphitheater divided into three blocks of seating by four flights of stairs, and he, preferring the back rows, chose the farthest seat right in the middle. Attended by undergraduates, mostly, the class was nearly two-thirds full, many ambling in several minutes late, and the professor was late as well. David pulled the Calvino book he was reading, Invisible Cities, from his bag. Engrossed by its simple complexity, and the notion that it would make an unbelievable video game, he was considering whether to transfer to the other class when he saw Alice walking down the steps to his left.
He couldn’t move. Even from this distance, it was her hair that arrested him. Growing down to the small of her back, it had a particular equine luster and silkiness that caught light at the crown and made him understand immediately the pleasure of grooming horses and why girls sat before mirrors meditatively brushing their hair at bedtime. He wished he could’ve been her father and had years of such a delicious sight. She was tall and big-boned, so full-chested and softball-player solid that she made the coeds surrounding her seem like mere girls. Carrying a spiral notebook with a pen quivered in the loops—her light load suggesting an economy, a practicality, he liked immediately—she took each step exaggeratedly, plunking her feet down as if she were amusing herself. He also couldn’t help noticing she was alone. She cleared the hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear, then turned to him. That nothing indicated she’d registered his presence, though he was obviously staring, made her seem an even cooler customer. There was cream in the hazel of her eyes, a near-gray that made them appear almost wolfish.
This could be the worst class he’d ever take, he thought, but he wouldn’t miss a single session. She took a seat three rows back from the front, one section to his left. She pulled her pen from the spiral ring and began chewing its end languidly, like a dog its beloved toy. David, meanwhile, had shifted to a pointer’s stiffness himself, on high alert, gripping the edge of his flip-down desk.
The professor—Dr. Otto—came rushing in. He was rangy and soft-spoken, his voice so low that David almost moved closer. Otto had a shock of white hair and