Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [177]
As for Alice and him, it took David a month to work up the courage to talk to her. By that point they’d watched The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, and Shadow of a Doubt. By Notorious they were sitting next to each other; during every movie they watched after that, they were holding hands. And once the two of them got together, they watched these movies (and more) all over again and spent their nights analyzing images, speculating about what became of these characters after the screen faded to black, arguing about feminism and sexism after having sex, and whether or not Dr. Sam did it or Marilyn’s killer was someone else. So when David looked back, this time in their lives was itself a montage, images from these films and the Sheppard murder crosscut with his memories of Alice and of falling in love, and he often thought of Hitchcock’s work and the Sheppard crime as being a part of their DNA—a braided filament that augured their fate.
“I remember all that,” she said. “We were happy then.”
They were still lying in bed together holding hands, and he could see her smiling in the darkness. “So you remember being happy?” Pepin asked.
“I do.”
“Do you think we’ll be happy from now on?”
“I don’t know. I want us to be.”
“I want to wake up tomorrow and feel this blessed.”
He woke, and he did: he felt as happy. They did. And for the next month it seemed as if they’d arrived somewhere new.
Then they were robbed.
By the time Pepin finished writing, it was nighttime.
It had been an awful day—with Alice and on the page—and he went to make himself a drink, but before reaching into the freezer for the vodka he stared at their refrigerator door, at the Polaroids of her and her weekly progress, her diminishing size, though to Pepin now they seemed pixels in a single giant portrait, a floating death’s head with black spaces between each fissure, this larger picture not of Alice’s face but rather her fragile psyche about to fly apart. What had happened? How did things change so fast? It was as if they’d fallen into a bottomless hole.
He went into the living room to sit on the couch. He hadn’t showered, though he’d eaten all through the day. Except for his study, the apartment was completely dark. Clouds hung gray-bellied and low over the city, illuminated by the light beaming from the jagged towers. When he heard Alice’s keys at the door, he closed his eyes for a moment and listened to her footfalls enter, stop, and then approach. He looked and she was standing by the window, her fitness now shaming him—she must’ve gone to the gym after their fight—the sight of her doubled by the reflection in the glass, doubled but still smaller by half in her black spandex tights and Under Armour top, svelte as a superhero after a transformation as radical as his own; he’d gained major weight since she’d returned, was heavier now than ever, had let himself go, his black hair furred out, his beard scraggly, frizzed, wild, and unkempt. But hers was an exterior change only. Her mind was the same—worse, in fact, than ever—and the nights were somehow darker because of it, Pepin dreading her return (tonight as much as every other day) and what mood she might bring with her, the whole apartment doubly darkened with it now. She was in a bad place. He was officially worried about her.
She’d been like this since they were robbed four weeks ago. They’d come home that Sunday afternoon, back from the park, from a walk after breakfast, happy—weren’t they happy then?—only to find the door ajar; and when they slowly pushed it open the very air inside seemed supercharged, heavy with disarray, even before they saw the chaos itself. In the living room, Pepin pressed Alice behind