Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [46]
“I knew it,” she said. “All along I knew!”
“Knew? Knew what? What did you know?”
“Nothing! I know nothing!”
“And why is that?” David said. “Huh?”
“Because you never say what you feel! And I’m never going to expose a kid to that—ever!” She turned to walk away.
“Oh, go ahead,” he said. “Just walk away. That’s a great fucking lesson to teach!”
“Fucking lesson?” she said. “Everything’s fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Oh, please,” he said.
“Oh, fucking please,” she said. “Oh, fucking Dad. Fucking Mom.”
“No,” David said, waiting to spear her with a glance: “No fucking Mom at all!”
But the kid they hadn’t had also made them better people.
“I’m sorry,” David said later.
It was evening now and no lights were on in the apartment. For hours they’d been sitting separately in the dark. Hands in pockets, he’d appeared at their bedroom door.
“You’re right,” he said. “I have a potty mouth.”
“No,” she said, “you’re right. I threw a temper tantrum.”
“I had a meltdown.”
“I should take a time-out.”
They laughed, and when they were silent again, he said, “Alice, I don’t want you to think I don’t—”
“Don’t say it,” she said.
It was like practice, David thought, like playing house. The child they hadn’t had was watching them, refereeing, keeping them honest. He or she was already improving their characters. Their boy or girl would tell their spouse one day, “I never once saw my parents fight.”
Later, David and Alice made love. They thought about you know what. But the fight had made them both doubtful, so they didn’t.
What were they waiting for? David wondered. Or were they waiting for nothing? Was there something he hadn’t said? Was there something Alice needed to tell him?
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
They were in their bed, their California king. Days had passed, weeks, months. Summer was at an end. Their conversation had lasted a whole season. It was evening, they had drinks in hand and the television was on. Even when they were broke they’d splurged on this bed. They had to sleep comfortably together. Every couple had their unbreakable rules: no shared bank accounts, no going to bed angry, no eating the last X. Their rule: No sleeping in separate beds. Spatially, that was tantamount to divorce: mere coexistence. Separate beds would mean the end.
“I died once,” Alice said.
The woman knew how to get your attention, he thought. It was her loner’s knack, the ability to stand out when necessary. He turned off the TV and adjusted his pillows.
“When was this?”
“When I was eight,” she said.
It was early spring, she said, and stormy outside. Her parents had a fire going and were watching TV—though when Alice said parents, he had to note that she meant her uncle Ladd and his wife, Karen, for they’d raised her, and in his mind he pictured their lakefront home in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He imagined their long sitting room, pine-paneled and carpeted, with pictures of animals—a lion, a pack of wolves, a leopard—on the wall. Ladd was no nature lover, really, this simply a reflex of naturalist kitsch. Alice had come to live with them under sad circumstances. Her mother, Dorothy, pregnant with a boy six years Alice’s junior, had died in labor, along with her son. Her father, Thomas, a successful inventor, went into such a tailspin that he handed Alice off in order to recover; he managed to gather himself together and remarry four years later, but never collected his daughter. And though she always spoke lovingly of Ladd and Karen, her lingering sense of abandonment was amplified, David thought, by the fact that her uncle and aunt had no children of their own, so Alice was treated from the minute of her arrival as a privileged boarder they provided for, along with the distant contributions of her father, but who was fundamentally alone.
As she’d said, they were watching television after dinner, riveted by the coverage of Prince Charles and Lady Di’s visit to Australia. In the living room, her “parents” had the only pair of reclining chairs that faced the TV screen, so Alice was at the other end of the room,