Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [44]
“Did you play Bang You’re Dead! when you were a kid?” David said to an enraged caller on Larry King. “You didn’t think anybody was dying, did you? Did you kill someone because you played it? Clearly not, because here you are, talking to me. I think kids today can tell the difference too. So bang! You’re dead! Next caller, please.”
Development and royalty money began to flow into Spellbound like mad, so much so that he bought their apartment outright that year. Lying in bed, each with a drink in hand, each exhausted, she buried beneath tests and lesson plans, lines of code and images from playtests burned onto his retinas, talk about children seemed to have arisen naturally, what with their successful adulthoods opening before them like a pair of wings. They’d met at a small college in Virginia, David in grad school in computer design, Alice getting her undergraduate degrees in mathematics and education. After marrying a year later, they’d agreed that what they wanted first and foremost was to get established. Now in their late twenties and early thirties (she and he respectively), they felt blessed by luck, by their jobs—Alice was teaching at the Trinity School—and by each other, but most of all by the most precious commodity in Manhattan: space.
It was a conversation that lasted for months, the first stage of conception, really, this future only one of many to make it downstream and penetrate their brains, of boy or girl and what constituted being ready, of favorite names—all of this wheat separated from the chaff of old boyfriends and girlfriends, despised classmates and beloved teachers, cousins and enemies, one-night stands and dead pets, a veritable discarded universe of bad associations and ridiculous situations. Collectively, it evoked in David a mixture of feelings. Giddiness, on the one hand. Children were marriage’s magic, making it a family. To make a child was like pushing the button to trigger the obverse of nuclear war: mutually assured creation. The willful act of utterly altering your lives, it was radical. Even the attempt to make one potentially changed everything. For there were no guarantees, David thought now, were there? Though you started the process believing there were. Yet at the same time their talk sparked frustration, anxiety, and often struck him as pure abstraction and, to a degree, distraction. It made him defensive. Selfishly, he wondered if Alice didn’t love him as much as she used to. It made him worry their sex life had fizzled somehow, that Alice was bored, and that a child, with all of its attendant busyness and business, served to replace something that was fading between them. Because a child would be the end of something, he’d thought then. It would be the end of just them.
He didn’t tell this to his wife.
The conversation was continuous and knew no boundaries or schedule. They picked up with it at breakfast or when they called each other from work. It was never a non sequitur and always fair game. It was always there. A child spotted on the street, on the bus, peeking over the seat of an airplane at the two of them like a cuddly Kilroy, appearing at the table at a couple-with-kids dinner party, often with a gorgeous sitter in tow, as if she were a fringe benefit to the whole package, the child’s hair still tubby-time wet, Johnson & Johnson clean, pj’s smelling pristine, boy or girl or the whole brood well-behaved, crazy-cute, super-smart, early-to-bed-and-late-to-rise—“Easy,” according to the parents. Their children were allusions to David and Alice’s private discussions, to their marriage’s next chapter, procreation’s promise of happiness if his mood was right. And if it was