Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross Page B

to mumble her gibberish; other times, her dreams only briefly interrupted, she went right back to sleep as if nothing had happened. Occasionally she woke demanding more, to which he’d say, “Go to sleep,” and she would. Or she’d simply seem confused. “Did we have sex last night?” she asked the next morning, more than once. He’d either tell the truth and say yes or lie and say no, just to test if she’d been awake. And if he’d had a lot to drink too, he’d say he couldn’t remember either, which was often the truth as well.
    He did what he wanted. If he needed time out of the apartment, he went down to the courtyard and tended to his roses. He kept a bed of them long and wide enough to bury a couple of people laid head to foot. It was therapeutic to fertilize, prune, and spray them and then be rewarded for his fidelity with such vivid color, such erect beauty. Sometimes, when he brought the cuttings up, he’d place a particularly beautiful flower on Hannah’s breakfast or dinner tray. But this of all things seemed to enrage her the most, and she’d throw the flower at him, cursing him with all her might—another thing he liked about the new arrangement. Because when she yelled at him her words somehow lost their sting—an invalid’s complaint, since she wouldn’t get up—and he’d simply turn, walk out of the room, and close the door.
    He missed her when he was out in the world, true, remembering how she once took his hand or arm without asking, or slid up behind him and held him around his waist, or whispered in his ear things they might dolater, but now he always knew where she was, at home and in bed. Yet after the “I’m home” and the dinner making, the eating and the “How was it?,” the dishes, the trip to the freezer, and the sound of whiskey tinkling over the ice cubes, a longing sometimes came over him as he sat there in his favorite chair, a longing for Hannah that he didn’t completely understand, a longing not just for the woman he’d married but also for a time when the present didn’t press down on him, hunching his shoulders and tightening his back. A longing, he surmised, for youth, though it was more complex than that and involved a state of mind he could no longer remember—an Alzheimer’s longing, disorienting, ephemeral, irretrievable. The feeling, as when someone bumped into you in a packed subway car, was completely new, unexpected, and uniquely terrible.
    It was a longing for what it felt like when they’d first fallen in love. Is this, he wondered, what it means to grow old together?
    There was only one problem he had with their arrangement now that he’d grown accustomed to it. He couldn’t remember what their life was like before, no matter how hard he tried, his memory always coming up short. He could recall doing things together, but it was as if they’d happened to characters in a film watched with the sound off or to shadow-figures in someone else’s dream. He
did
remember the long drive from New York to Knoxville to meet her family—a straight shot of twelve hours—but nothing about how he’d felt about her then or anything they’d said to each other during the trip; forgot how it was that watching her mouth move excited him. He
did
remember their honeymoon on Kiawah Island, how they’d walked hand in hand for hours on those beaches so wide and flat, her palm always remaining dry in his. He recalled the strange sense of romance he’d felt gazing at the wide-armed shrimp boats trolling offshore, how he and Hannah had talked of buying one and making what seemed like the perfect life together. But he could
not
remember what
she’d
felt at these moments, though he was certain she’d told him, nor what making love felt like then, when her body was so precious and new, though he knew that it once was.
    He’d struggled, recently, to remember anything she’d ever said.
    How did people erase themselves like this? he wondered.
    There was only Hannah in