Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [45]
Yet sometimes, while the two of them made love, David was tempted in his fit of passion to pluck out her diaphragm, the very idea of that thing inside her slightly suffocating to him, the annihilation of his sperm causing him physical pain—and killing all those millions of possibilities, his poor penis people! The whole exchange seemed like a microscopic game of Missile Command, and the very thought of ejaculating inside an unprotected Alice was enough to bring him to the verge.
“Oh God,” he cried. “Take it out. Take it out, Alice, please!”
“You’re ready?” she said.
He stopped. “Are you?” he asked.
She took his face in her hands. Looked at him. Shook her head.
“No,” she said, “I’m not.”
But afterward he felt the most terrific sense of relief. They’d nearly made a terrible mistake.
The conversation continued.
Once, while David was waiting to board an airplane, he saw a mother try to stop her inconsolable daughter from crying. But what made it unique was how loud the girl was. She wailed. She howled. She screamed, no shit, at the top of her lungs, for so long that it made the expression at once literal and surreal too, as if the squalling were a gnome standing on a ladder inside her neck, the topmost rung by her tonsils, and pulling down on the cord of uvula to hold her mouth open, using the girl’s whole head as a kind of loudspeaker. At first people were embarrassed, distraught for the mother, but as the event wore on it turned into a situation. Uncalled for, security came. “We heard screaming,” an officer said. And then people within banshee range began to snicker and then laugh, David among them. He even called his wife.
“There’s this girl,” David said. “She’s screaming. She’s just a kid. Listen.” He held up his phone.
“I can hear her,” Alice said. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” David said. Then Alice laughed too, like it was cute, like it was just kids. Whippersnappers.
And this soon became part of their conversation as well, although he never told her what had happened afterward. The child screamed on and on, for so long now that the noise was ambient, ignorable, something you could fall asleep to, “The Star Spangled Banner” playing over hissing TV snow, and while David watched, both awed and amused, the man in a suit sitting next to him lowered the magazine from his face and said, “You have kids?”
“No,” David said, and chuckled. This girl’s energy was amazing. Her sheer stamina convinced him she was gifted. A siren singing her siren song.
“Don’t,” the man said. And then he looked at him until David looked back. “They’ll ruin your fucking life.”
David studied the child until his plane boarded. When he turned back, the man was gone.
The conversation continued. Much of David and Alice’s talk was standard-issue, of course, and repetitive. In music, the term was augmentation: the same notes drawn out over longer periods of rhythm, chords widened over time. Even choosing not to talk about it was talking about it.
“Are we talking about this again?” David asked, and laughed. He and Alice were sitting together in the kitchen’s breakfast nook. He was drunk. It was only a Tuesday. A Tuesday!
“I say we find some pot,” Alice said, pouring herself more wine, “and get high.”
Though what he thought she’d left unspoken was: While we can. It was as if choosing to act like a kid made you more of an adult. They drank and drank, then they screwed—angry, tear-your-clothes-off sex—and in the morning, he thought to himself: How long can we keep ourselves so amused?
It wasn’t always amusing.
The conversation could turn toxic, metamorphose and metastasize, could turn on them. In fights, they’d put their unconceived child between them and make it take sides: the original preparental sin.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said, “if you think I’d ever have a child with someone as selfish as you!”
“Then don’t,” he said, “because I don’t want a kid. You want the kid.