Mr. Peanut Page 2

  From this chaos there emerged a contraption, a Frankensteinian engine, oddly insectlike, exoskeletal, that always included a seat of some kind and to which Alice attached her hands, hips, or bound her feet; hung upside down from or spun around in; the machine, as she pumped, pressed, or pedaled, threatening to evolve from exercise station to transportation and inevitably shaking itself apart, the whole process reminding David of old films of crazy planes and whirlybirds—the ones before the Wright brothers—that fell from cliffs, ramps, or towers, or simply exploded with the effort to fly.

  The cardiovascular eliminated, Alice paid meticulous attention to her diet. She cut out snacks, carbs, and empty calories and was generally miserable, but she lost weight quickly. Because of her size, she shed her first ten pounds within two weeks. She became preoccupied, obsessed, and gave David regular reports. She knew the time, to the minute, of her bowel movements. Assessing their curly and oblong heft, she could guess their approximate weight. At work, she walked the stairs instead of riding the elevator, took soy milk instead of cream in her coffee. She ate the apples, after checking them for razors, that her delinquent and schizophrenic students left on her desk. Her sex drive disappeared; she refused to be touched, and when she asked David what he thought of her progress—two months in, twenty-three pounds lost—he answered her encouragingly, because the change in her body was before-and-after dramatic. With glee, she pulled her pants away from her waist and punched extra holes in her belts. She felt thin, she said. But David was secretly pessimistic; in fact, he was certain she would fail. In one of their closets were boxes of her winter clothes, and around the same time every fall she had David bring them down from the top shelves.

  “All of them?” he asked from the stepladder.

  “Of course all of them,” she answered from below. The dresses were from thinner days, outdated—Alice’s fashions were cyclical—and in the mornings, she modeled for him while he ate his breakfast, doing quick little turns on the tile.

  “Isn’t this dress funny?” she said, pinching the cloth in her fingers, pulling the skirt out wide and triangular, spreading the fabric like a pair of wings. David couldn’t help but laugh, a chuckle Alice thought was of joy, and she came over to him, took his head in her hands, clutching his hair and pressing his face into her chest. “This is it,” she whispered. “This is the one.” He looked up. She pulled his face toward hers and kissed him, then walked out the door, chin up and shoulders back—Alice gaining altitude, he thought, as she dropped ballast, a confidence in her stride that gave him a shiver of fear.

  Is this it? David wondered. Is this the one?

  Maybe, he thought, but most likely no. On certain afternoons, she was low. It was December, she was three months in, nearly thirty pounds gone, and the whole project seemed endless to her—impossible. She questioned her resolve. She would never drop the weight. The past week and a half, she’d lost only three pounds. Once—all right, twice—she’d cheated. (Going to work, she’d caved and stopped in McDonald’s for two Egg McMuffin meals. Yesterday, when David surprised her in the kitchen, she whirled round with her face covered in powdered sugar, an uneaten donut in each hand.) She called David at the office, pulling him from the daily playtest of their new game Escher X—short for Escher Exit. It was a work of programming and conceptual brilliance. The environments were based on famous Escher prints—Relativity, Belvedere, Ascending and Descending, to name a few—and the challenge of the game was to guide your avatar (the white humanoid from Encounter) through each inescapable level, each round-and-round realm, until you found the secret means of escape, the button or tile that uncoiled the environments’ Mobius strip. Though perhaps its best effect (this was on especially wonderful display in the Relativity level) was its replication, while you played, of the experience of looking at one of the prints themselves, of ascending a set of stairs to suddenly find yourself going down, to enter a room where someone was sitting on the ceiling, the ceiling becoming the floor, the waterfall falling up. And there were battles, of course, with all sorts of Escher monsters: the human-headed bird from Another World II, the alligators from Reptiles, the dragon from Dragon, the predator fish from Predestination. These exchanges upped your skill level with each victory and conferred more weapons on your avatar until you were strong enough for the final confrontation with your double—the stooped black humanoid who ruled the entire realm. His name, appropriately, was Mobius.

  The game was beautiful. But it was also full of bugs, and they’d blown their projected release date. When David answered the phone, he was curt at first, but Alice sounded desperate.

  “David,” she said, “do you love me?”

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Even if I’m like this?”

  He closed his eyes and rested his head against the window. “Even if you’re like what?”

  “You’re sweet,” Alice said.

  David was silent.

  “Because I don’t think I can do it,” she said.

  “Don’t think you can do what?”

  “It. Die-it. What do you think?”

  “Alice … ”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you think you can do it?”

  “Because it takes so long.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Because it goes so slowly.”

  “Because you’re in the middle.”

  “Am I in the middle?” she said.

  “We’ve talked about the middle.”

  “Tell me again about the middle.”

  “The middle is long and hard.”

  “I’m stuck in the middle of trying to lose my middle.” She laughed, then began to weep.

  “I’m in the middle too,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  “Of my game.” Of my book, he thought. “But that’s the thing about the middle. It’s like holding your breath longer than you think you can. It’s the point before you black out, right before you surface. The last stretch uphill—the highest part—right before going down. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not stuck. You’re moving. But you can’t see it. I can see it.”

  “Oh, David, I want a burrito. I want a chimichanga with extra cheese.”

  “But you’re going to hold out.”

  “I am?”

  “You’re going to resist.”

  “I am.”

  “You can do this.”

  These conversations bolstered her. Her determination was renewed. Home from school, she went on long walks uptown, to Central Park, up to the reservoir and around the cinder track and back. This gave David precious time alone. He returned to his book, retrieving the box from underneath his desk and pulling out the new pages he’d written. He needed a change of scenery, so he moved to the kitchen table, set out his laptop, and sat down. He felt clear-minded. Focused. Everything was in order. It had seemed like years since he’d had enough peace to write.

  This is what it would be like, David thought, if Alice were gone.

  “Hello?” She came into the kitchen and kissed him. Her face was flushed, her cheeks cold and slightly wet. Winter seemed to trail behind her. “I’m going to do it this time. I really am. And it’s because of you.”

  She stood there, smiling. Saw the makeshift desk.

  “Were you working?”

  David twirled his pen in his fingers. “I was just finishing up.”

  She packed her own bag lunch in the evenings, creasing the foil of her sandwich as neatly as a present and taping it closed. She stapled the paper bag and wrote MY LUNCH in black felt pen on the front, then placed it lovingly in the fridge. The whole pantry was marked in this fashion: MY CRACKERS, MY PEACHES, MY TUNA. She set out her breakfast the night before as well, her spoon, knife, and napkin arranged and ready for use, the cereal bowl turned upside down and her banana curved below it like a wide smile. It was a lonely little scene, David thought, staring at the place setting in the refrigerator’s light and secretly drinking her vanilla soy milk (MY SOY MILK she wrote on masking tape), her box of cereal (MY CEREAL) next to the measuring cup, its pictured athlete—receiver, hurdler, basketball player—frozen in leaps or bounds.

  “I’m ready for sleep,” Alice told him.

  She’d crawled under the covers and then she reached beneath her, strapped the sleep apnea mask to her face, and lay on her back staring blankly, eyes fixed on the image of her next meal. Look at how it comforts her, David thought, the calories counted like so many sheep.

  She dropped off the moment he turned out the light.

  While she slept, she exhaled musically, a cheerful, childlike hum. The machine whirred pleasantly. Not ready for the darkness or sleep, David lay there thinking about Escher X, his novel, and her accidental death. But then he listened to Alice breathe. And as he listened he experienced the most intense feeling of sympathy for her, a compassion that seemed to require her inertness, her unconsciousness. There was a whole world of torture she had to live through every day. He remembered a fat girl he’d gone to grade school with, how mercilessly he and all the other children had teased her—Bobbie Jo’s a hippo, Bobbie Jo’s a cow, Bobbie Jo’s a bullfrog, Bobbie Jo’s a sow. He still knew the song. Of course, Alice’s own students tormented her as well, David imagined. They were delinquents, criminals, loonies; they had no sense. He boiled with rage against them, though she’d never mentioned a single instance of abuse. He’d heard a young couple talking about Alice once in Central Park. “Look at her,” the man said to his girlfriend as David, having gone off to get Alice a Dove bar, came up behind them. “I mean, how do let yourself get like that?” The woman was wearing a spandex suit and Rollerblades. With her bright helmet, protective pads, and athletic body, she looked like a superhero.
“I think you’d have to kill me,” she said. “Promise me you will?” He’d kill her, he promised, with his elephant gun. “You’re terrible,” the girl said, laughing and gliding off. You are terrible, David thought. I’m terrible—because he’d laughed too. He remembered the wakes of silence he and Alice trailed behind them as they walked across Sheep Meadow, conversations interrupted, looks both he and she knew were for her. She’d walk straight ahead, tucking her hair quickly behind her ear. At parties, when they were introduced to strangers, he watched them pretend she was unexceptional. Whenever possible, he stood next to her—he was a large man himself, stocky, over six feet tall—to dampen her effect.

  In bed, he slid close to her under the covers and put his ear to her back. He listened to her heart, its determined little pah pah pah like a hand smacking a pillow, as proportional in size, David figured, as brain to brontosaurus. And then he imagined her soul—all souls, and what they might look like. They were stalkish, spirit-forms, he imagined, that resembled the renderings of those slanty-eyed extraterrestrials, and their job, among other things, was to operate the body—their mortal vehicles! But Alice’s body required special on-the-job training. It had additional levers that required exceptional soul-strength to pull, manual gears with a tricky clutch, no power steering, of course, and signs like those on the backs of eighteen-wheelers—HOW’S MY DRIVING? or THIS VEHICLE MAKES WIDE RIGHT TURNS—but enjoying none of the respect you gave a truck on the road.

  In the dark, Alice hummed her single slumberous note. Surreptitiously, David fondled her. Her breasts were soft as feathers, her body (with its busy driver-soul checking dials, adjusting gauges!) bed-warmed. When she didn’t respond he rolled over to stare at the ceiling and, now that he was still, his mind drifted, recalling these past five years, her transformation and where it really began, and he felt the same creeping sense of complicity, as if he were the cause of her disease. He must do something to cure her.

  We tell stories of other people’s marriages, Detective Hastroll thought. We are experts in their parables and parabolas. But can we tell the story of our own? If we could, Hastroll thought, there might be no murders. If we could, we might avoid our own cruelties and crimes.

  He thought of his own wife, Hannah, home in bed. Was it obvious to Sheppard when he asked after her? Could he tell that he was near the breaking point? That he was in despair?

  Through the one-way glass, Hastroll watched as Sheppard turned on his bedside manner for the suspect, his tone at once authoritative and warm, a bond established between the two men almost immediately. Pepin even let him reach across the table to clasp his wrist and arm—a former doctor’s strategy of empathy, of gentle words and most of all attention, so that it was as if Pepin’s choked sobs were failed attempts to describe the location and nature of his pain.

  “I hate this good-cop routine,” Hastroll said to himself, sitting so close to the glass that his breath fogged the pane.

  Detective Sheppard did these things to relax the suspect. He thought he might take Pepin’s mind off his grief for a moment and then they could talk. Though truth be told, Sheppard couldn’t get his own mind off the victim, couldn’t forget how he’d stepped into the kitchen and come upon Alice Pepin, thirty-five, Caucasian female, maybe 130 pounds, a gorgeous woman, really, with long, fine brown hair, hazel eyes that no one had closed, the poor thing stone-cold dead. She was lying beside the kitchen table, having fallen straight back, still seated in her chair, a broken plate and peanuts scattered next to her face, her hands clasped at her neck as if she were choking herself. Her skin was discolored—a violet hue of thundercloud, of fresh bruise—and her lips were grossly swollen, pink as intestine and distended as slugs. At the corners of her mouth and covering her teeth, blood and flecks of nutmeat.

  Sheppard had walked over to the medical examiner. “Say there, Harry, what have we got?”

  “Victim appears to have died of anaphylactic shock.”

  Sheppard turned to the woman again. Where she’d clutched her neck, her fingernails had broken the skin. “What was the allergen?”

  Harry looked at him over his bifocals, stopped scribbling on his pad, and pointed his pen at the table. On it was an open can of Planters peanuts. “Her esophagus swelled shut.”

  Sheppard walked over. On the label, Mr. Peanut tipped his top hat and smiled, his monocle as opaque as when Hastroll’s glasses caught the light. He had his black cane propped on his shoulder, his pinky pointed skyward as he grabbed his hat’s brim, so he looked to Sheppard like a man about to introduce himself—a chipper fellow about to say hello.

  The husband, David Pepin, sat on the couch in the living room with his face in his hands—the index and middle fingers on his left hand wrapped in gauze. He was thick-built like Hastroll, tall too, with a shock of black hair. Sheppard questioned him for several minutes, made a quick phone call, then approached Hastroll, who appeared from another room.

  “Husband says he came home,” Sheppard said, “and found his wife sitting at the table with a plate of peanuts.”

  “And?” Hastroll said.

  “She ate them.”

  Hastroll grunted.

  “He said they’d been in a fight,” Sheppard said.

  “Did she know they could kill her?”

  “He says she knew she was allergic.”

  “Does she carry an EpiPen?” Hastroll asked.

  “Several,” Sheppard said. “He claims she hid them.”

  Hastroll glanced at Pepin, then whispered, “He did it.”

  “Easy, Ward.”

  “What happened to his fingers?”

  “He said he was trying to clear her airway.” Sheppard loaded his pipe and lit it. “Apparently she bit him in the process.”

  “You buy suicide?”

  “She had a history of depression. She was on a combination of Wellbutrin and Prozac. Husband says she’d been going through a bad patch. Plus she’d also lost a lot of weight.”

  “What’s a lot?” Hastroll asked.

  “More than one hundred and fifty pounds.”

  “Seems to me that would make her happy,” Hastroll said.

  Sheppard shook his head. “She had hyperthyroidism. It can cause deliriums. Extreme agitation. He thinks she might have just snapped.”

  “Did you speak to her doctor?”

  “Psychiatrist corroborates about the medication. Not the ideation.”

  Sheppard and Hastroll turned to look briefly at Pepin, who stared squarely back.

  “What’s your feeling here, Sam? What’s the golden gut say?”

  “I’d like to sniff around for a while.”

  “Roger that,” Hastroll said.

  “Try to track down those EpiPens. See whose fingerprints are on them.”

  “I got plainclothes on it already.”

  “Check his hands for traces of nutmeat or salt.”

  “Already did it,” Hastroll said. “They’re clean.”

  “Check the sinks. He might’ve washed his hands. Bag the bars of soap and the towels.”

  Hastroll held up a plastic bag. The towels inside were bloody.

  “What about samples from under his nails?” Sheppard said.

  Hastroll snapped open an enormous switchblade. “Good thinking.”

  “Then take him in for questioning,” Sheppard said.

  In the Pepins’ kitchen, a CSI unit was dusting pieces of the broken plate for prints and swabbing blood samples from Alice’s mouth and teeth. Two men from the coroner’s office had arrived with a gurney and were waiting outside while the crime scene photographer took pictures. When he finished, the coroner’s men traced chalk around the body. While they slid the bag underneath it, Sheppard studied the woman’s face. Her lips had stretched away from her gums, her teeth were bared and gnashed in refusal, her hands clasped around her neck as if she could squeeze the obstruction from her windpipe as you would a splinter from your finger. So different from the expressions of suicides, Sheppard thought. Those were often sleepy or glum. Tired. Wiped out. As if they’d suddenly nodded off, like a narcoleptic. Sheppard remembered one he’d investigated, a beautiful girl who’d been jilted and had leapt from the Empire State Building observatory and landed on a cab, its roof crumpling like a soft mattress. Her left fist lay clenched over her heart, the other hand held just above her head, relaxed and open slightly. It seemed to Sheppard that if he’d jostled her shoulder she would’ve stirred, rolled off the taxi roof, and wandered off to bed. Or the CEO who’d blown his brains out in his office, gun to left temple, the right wall splattered with gray matter and blood as if a brush heavy with paint had been whipped across a canvas. He had only half a face, true, the one side of his head nuked outward, but there was no sign in what remained of terror or pain.