Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [9]
For a few moments, Sheppard gazed at the chalk figure. He couldn’t shake the expression on her face. As he moved through the apartment, it replaced the faces on all the pictures of her like some terrible special effect, superimposing itself on the framed snapshots that hung on the walls and sat on end tables, on the Polaroids—these he stared at for a long time—that covered the refrigerator door, all of them of Alice Pepin standing next to it, with the weeks and her diminishing weight written below each shot, the series arranged in horizontal rows, a pictorial record of before and after. She looked more confident as time passed, trying new things with her appearance the lighter she became: different colored lipstick on lips that appeared fuller as she sloughed weight, lashes brushed lush on eyes that seemed larger with each passing month, hair cut shorter on a face no longer so round. Yet there was an odd sadness to the photos, a sense, even in those with the happiest expressions, of some withering effect in this ritual, of unwillingness in the eye behind the lens. Studying them, Sheppard felt his imagination—all his empathetic powers—reaching out, only to be repelled. What did his wife, Marilyn, used to say? You never know what goes on behind closed doors. He could see her when she’d said it, the image floating across his mind’s eye. He tried to hold it still. She was standing in their kitchen, in her robe, her back to him, looking out the window—the one that faced the road—and she meant what she said not as an observation but an accusation, directed at him, of course. And that utterance, her disappointment and the regret it imparted, was something he knew he’d remember until the day he died, just as he would always remember the first time he saw her.
In the living room, high windows faced north, and outside it was that moment at the end of twilight when the lights of Manhattan were silvery and golden and occupied their own dimension, so the buildings seemed to contain them like snow globes, and the avenues, laden with headlights, looked like channels poured with molten steel. The Pepins’ new hardwood floors were the color of cognac. Twin Italian sofas, long and low to the ground and appearing as delicate as Calder sculptures, faced each other across an Oriental rug, its patterns as complex as the city outside. Built-in bookshelves climbed to the ceiling, the spines a brand of wallpaper that bespoke luxuries: education, quiet, time to read. The kitchen was updated: double oven, granite countertops, so much stainless steel and stone it looked like it could withstand an artillery shell. Adjoining it was a small dining room. The long hallway to the bedroom was lined with framed posters, screen shots of video games with the titles splashed across the top (Bang, You’re Dead! Escher X, Lamb to the Slaughter), and Escher prints—not reproductions but the real things, signed and numbered. Sheppard had to stop and admire them. Was there ever an artist who made the eye move as much as that Dutch master? Who invited and then thwarted your efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped? White and black swans migrating on a Möbius strip. Angels tracing the shapes of demons and vice versa, shrinking from a circle’s center in infinite tessellation. A man of pure white interlocked with a black gnome, the two-dimensional figures becoming three-dimensional as they split off from each other in the background, circling on separate paths toward a terminal encounter. Sheppard continued on. The hallway led past a small study to the bedroom, the space dominated by a king-size bed and a flat-screen television on the wall across from it. Bookshelves framed the headboard and climbed above it, filled with knickknacks, sculptures, photographs: she swimming with a dolphin, he in a sea kayak, the two of them arm in arm, backpacking in Hawaii or waving on a bridge in Paris. In this one Alice Pepin had grown extraordinarily fat.
Who says people can