Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [42]
He sat back in his chair and stared at the screen. Was that another lifetime, David wondered, or just yesterday?
It was odd how marriage flattened time, compressed it, hid its passing, time past and time present looping on each other, foreground gone background and back, until the new was the same as the old and the past impossibly novel and strange. For years now, they’d existed in a state of stasis. It was like a dream, an iteration expanding from the center that seemed much longer and much shorter than that. A typical day: He got up to a kitchen he’d cleaned spotless, no matter how elaborate their dinner the night before, and made their coffee. He foamed her milk and added sugar, taking his with milk alone, and carried both cups into the bedroom, waiting while she rearranged the pillows. She looked up at him, ready now, so nearly horizontal that it was like laying a cup on a corpse, her drinking a matter of lifting her lips to the mug instead of the opposite. She thanked him and then turned on the radio, the volume always set to low. They sat together in the lightening room, David waiting until she was fully awake, then he asked her how she’d slept. If either of them dreamed, they shared, though Alice always revealed more and always relied on him for interpretation. “I have to get up,” she’d finally say. She showered first, in order to get ready for school, while he went to the kitchen to get more coffee, fetch the paper from the front door, and boil himself an egg, thinking over the ruffling water that his life was only a history of such mornings, an ever-growing pile of eggs, the shells by now filling up the kitchen, spilling out into other rooms. He sat at their breakfast nook by the window, all the rooftops lit up by the rising sun, or shiny with rain, or padded with snow, went from the front page to Op Ed to Sports to the satellite’s view of the nation’s weather, always bypassing the first section, the long middle, all to the sound of her hair dryer. There was the quiet time while she put on her makeup. And then she appeared dressed, today’s person. He never once saw her eat breakfast during the week, though every morning she opened the refrigerator for a futile look. She told him good-bye, kissed him, and left. In the quiet apartment, he finished his breakfast, showered, dressed, made the bed, did his dishes, and then left too.
Did she exist during this time? Did she wonder, “Does he?” She called him from school sometime in the morning, just to check in. Usually they discussed dinner, agreed on a menu, said they loved each other. She rarely crossed his mind for the rest of the day. He stopped at the market on the way home. When he arrived at the apartment, she was reading the paper in the kitchen, the first section folded back on itself or her laptop open, and having a snack. They didn’t speak much initially. She was around children all day and needed her quiet time. He made himself whiskey in winter, vodka in summer, the sound of ice cubes hitting the bottom of the glass tracing the very contours of silence. He took a sip, heard the newspaper pages turning. At some unspoken point, he turned on the radio and started cooking. Over dinner, they talked about their respective days, though at times David became aware of his yawning ignorance about most of her life and of hers about his. He did the dishes while she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She put on her pajamas in the bedroom, the one time all day he was sure to see her naked, a sight that made him wonder when her nakedness had stopped being a miracle. And yet it still could be, the sheer R. Crumb fullness of her, the cloud-soft breasts large as throw pillows, their size and perfection demanding attention, there