Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [48]
Between her palms, the mass lay in a formless mound, almost all of its orange pigment gone. She looked up, and through her tears the TV’s light was in shards, like a child’s rendering of a star. Then Ladd and Karen turned to stare at her.
“I’m alive,” she said to them.
“Of course you are,” Karen said. She looked at her husband, shook her head, and turned back to the screen.
“I’m alive,” Alice said, and began to sob.
For a very long time, she wept in David’s arms. “You’ve got to promise,” she said to him later, “that we’ll never do that to a child.”
“We won’t,” he said. “Ever. I promise.”
She cried for so long that she soaked his shirt, then fell asleep in his arms.
Perhaps, David thought, the most important parts of the conversation were the things they didn’t want to repeat.
He lay there thinking. Did he have a story? He didn’t, and that was his great problem. He did everything he was supposed to do. He had a job and was successful at it. He was a good husband. But on a fundamental level, it was as if his own life hadn’t occurred to him.
He turned off the light.
“We could make a baby now,” she whispered in the middle of the night.
Many weeks had passed. They’d reached out to each other in dreams, as they often did, fondling toward lovemaking, a sleepwalking kind of foreplay that somehow made them freer with each other. After speaking, Alice bit her lower lip and looked at him in the dark. They hadn’t spoken of any of this since her story. David himself had nearly forgotten about their conversation and thought Alice might have as well. But the conversation was over, apparently. A decision had been reached. Either he’d passed some sort of test or she’d worked something out. Although now that they’d arrived at this point, it surprised him that it was so unmomentous. He couldn’t bring himself to meet her eyes for very long. He could say, “No” or “Yes,” but instead said, “We could.”
David was holding her diaphragm, the device lathered with white spermicidal paste. It was part of their ritual for him to insert it before he entered her—a rite of passage, he liked to joke—but he’d never taken the time to examine the thing, which he did now. It looked like the top of a newly iced cake. He placed it gently on the bedside table, wiped his fingers on the comforter and, while they made love, couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He felt like some virgin triangulating his pleasure, repeating dead kittens dead kittens dead kittens so as not to come too fast. He was desperately disengaged. They were procreating. Having intercourse. Twice Mr. Penis went soft, slippery, and had to be slipped like sausage back into the casing. It was the worst sex they’d ever had. And when he finally came, he thought: It doesn’t matter.
His disengagement—this first thought—haunted him.
“I think I’m pregnant,” Alice told him. And from the two blue lines on the home pregnancy test to her first trip to the OB confirming the same, from the odd dissociation that he felt holding her in his arms in the bathroom and at the doctor’s office—“We’re going to have a child,” she said excitedly—David feared this thought had somehow poisoned her womb, causing a deformity in the fetus, that it had set off some karmic ripple that could only lead to disaster. He knew it wasn’t rational, but the anxiety was relentless. Make her abort this thing, he thought. Wipe the slate and start clean. Then he regretted these thoughts too. He’d gone from feeling nothing to living in perpetual fear, and when he had the opportunity at the end of the month to fly to Honolulu for a week at a gamers’ convention, he was thrilled. Just being near Alice exacerbated his dread, convincing him that something was wrong, perhaps because she’d been terribly uncomfortable as soon as she became pregnant, as if the condition itself was slowly killing her. She suffered a broad range of symptoms: sharp pelvic pain from uterine spasms that doubled her over or sat her down suddenly, clutching her stomach no matter