Duplicate Keys

by Jane Smiley

“What did he tell you?”

  “Some stuff. He was confused, I think, about your relationship to Craig.”

  Rya nodded.

  “This is really stupid.” But the rush of anger that she had felt was somehow shocked out of her. She said, “I’ll buy you another drink, okay?” Rya nodded.

  IT TOOK a long time to get rid of Rya, and by the time Alice got home, it was nearly dark. She started when two figures stepped from under the fire escape on the side of her building, but they were only Ray and Jeff. Jeff was in gym shorts. His legs were as nicely shaped as his feet.

  “It’s been a while,” said Ray sarcastically.

  “Have you been waiting for me?” exclaimed Alice.

  Ray looked at his watch. “Two hours, thirty-seven minutes, ten, no, eleven seconds.”

  “Why are you waiting for me?”

  “No keys.”

  “I know, but why didn’t you go get something to eat or something?”

  “Alice, sweetheart, I don’t think you understand. We’re trying to stay out of sight for a while. That doesn’t include dinner at the Automat or pastry at Zabar’s.”

  She let them in. She knew he was going to ask it. He did. “So how about keys?”

  “It’s just one more night.”

  “Just for one night, then.”

  “Are you going out again tonight?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “I’ll let you in.”

  “It’ll be late.”

  “I’ll stay up.”

  “Three or four.”

  “I’ll get up.”

  “Don’t trust me?”

  “I hate to give out keys.”

  “Susan has some.”

  “That’s different. Besides, the very thought of Susan makes me even more cautious.”

  “Just for tonight and tomorrow. We’ll be in and out tonight, and then in and out tomorrow. You won’t be here to let us in, then.”

  “Why don’t you just stay in, not go out.”

  “I’ve got to straighten this tangle out. That means talking to people.”

  “Call them up.”

  “Come on, Alice.”

  “I can’t do it. It’s not personal, I just can’t do it. I’ll let you in tonight. We’ll figure out something about tomorrow.”

  “Alice—”

  “Let’s have something to eat.”

  Ray made a face. Jeff had slumped back onto the sofa with his feet on the window sill. His eyes were closed. He was uncomfortable to have around, Alice thought, like a tagalong eight-year-old brother who had nothing to say and no toys to play with. His eyes were blank or inward, certainly non-responsive even to Ray, who watched him but was never watched. Alice wondered how long he and Ray had been together. They acted like a well-established couple. After dinner, in the bathtub, she was suddenly sure they had left, taking her keys, but when she put on her robe and came out with her wet hair, they were sitting across the living room from each other. Ray was reading a magazine he had found, and Jeff was staring out the window, his arms crossed over his chest. His boylike quality made him menacing, too, as if his wishes and motives were not susceptible to adult understanding, or contained by adult scruples. Alice had been going to suggest that one of them stay while the other went out, but looking at them, she knew Ray would be the one to leave. Though she couldn’t imagine Jeff actually doing anything, she shrank from being alone with him after all. She dried her hair and combed it, and they sat up rather uncomfortably in the living room, hardly speaking. There was no mention of going out, and Alice finally went to bed.

  In the morning they were at the breakfast table when she got up. There was a quarter of a cantaloupe at her place, and a hot cup of coffee. Jeff was sitting beside the window with only a towel wrapped around his loins.

  “Sit down!” exclaimed Ray. “Here’s your coffee. How did you sleep? This is a lovely apartment. I thought all the windows on the street would make it noisy but there’s hardly any traffic, is there?”

  Alice was alerted. She looked from one to the other and said, “You went out last night, didn’t you?”

  “I think one of us is going to be here most of the day, but we’ll be gone by the time you get home. Thanks a lot for putting us up.”

  “Did you go out?” She looked at Jeff, who shrugged.

  Ray said, “Some people are just more available at night than they are during the day.”

  “Tell me how you got back in, Ray. I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

  Ray glanced at Jeff, who was gazing down on Eighty-fourth Street. Jeff coughed, then yawned. Ray said, “Well, we really didn’t want to wake you. You’ve done a lot for us already. We didn’t get home till after five. That’s the worst time to wake up if you want to get back to sleep. The sun was up and everything.”

  “So how did you get in?”

  “We, uh, borrowed your keys when you were in the bathtub.”

  “Ray!”

  Jeff turned and looked at her impassively. It was he who had done the borrowing, Alice could see.

  “No harm done,” carolled Ray. “They’re right back in your purse. It really was better that way.”

  “If I’d known—”

  “But you didn’t, and you didn’t feel a thing. Look for yourself.” He cleared his throat.

  “Well, after this, I feel like looking. I feel like counting my money, too.” She addressed this to Jeff. “I mean, I don’t even know your last name.”

  “Johnson,” said Jeff.

  The sarcastic way he spoke infuriated her. She jumped up. “Who are you, anyway? You know something? I don’t like you one bit! What do you do? Where do you get your money? Why are you so rude?” But the real insult, the precise devastating indictment of his character that she wanted to make escaped her, and she felt already thwarted.

  Ray said, in a neutral voice, “He’s a student at Parsons, okay?”

  “My whole problem is that I assume everyone else is as innocent as I am. I’m really furious with you, Ray. I think you betrayed our friendship and my trust in you.”

  “Our friendship wasn’t so blooming when we asked if we could stay.”

  “That’s different—”

  “Is it? You were worried about you, not about me.”

  “Don’t I have good reason to be?”

  “Not as far as I’m concerned. I never did anything to you. Look at that desk in there. Who made that for you—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ray! And you’re a fool to boot! You act like we all still live out in Minnesota, where everything turns out all right! Where nobody really wants to hurt you, even when they’re mad! Shit, Ray!” But looking into their two pairs of eyes, one indifferent, one fearful but veiled, she bit her useless tongue and stomped off to her room to get dressed for work.

  When she left, Ray kissed her good-bye. From the other side of the living room, Jeff was looking at her quizzically. On the way down in the elevator, she inspected her keys, and then counted her money. It was there, all eight dollars and thirty-seven cents. And her credit cards, too. Still, when she got to work, she took a moment to call up Parsons and ask if a Jeff Johnson was registered for classes there. He was. There were three of him.

  THAT morning, Alice decided that the flood of Henry Mullet had largely passed over her. Although taken from time to time by shudders of desire, she was able to think of her work, to talk to Laura and Howard, to anticipate the next evening with Henry (she would wear her white gauze dress, embroidered peasant neck-line, pink and gold Mexican sash, she had already spotted the raspberries she would take on Broadway, and been reassured of a new shipment tomorrow) with pleasure rather than craving. Although she realized that this state of suspension was temporary, she enjoyed it.

  About Ray and Rya she refused to think. She always felt secure in the library, secure within the walls (how thick were they? two feet or something?). The murder, of course, had disappeared from the newspapers, and so even from the chance of di
scussion over coffee or lunch. Laura and Howard and Sidney still had no idea of her involvement, and neither did her parents, for that matter. She had spoken to them once more, and they had mentioned the garden, her grandmother Bovbjerg’s knee operation, the microwave oven that might be lost in the mails, and a girl Alice had known in high school who had died in a car accident. In the library, Alice felt detached from the rest of her life, and more than that, permanently, immortally treading the aisles of the stacks, everlastingly answering questions about the Reader’s Guide, deathlessly sifting through small literary magazines and considering them for order and reorder. Sidney muttered frequently about feeling trapped, Laura schemed over jobs abroad, but Alice embraced her routine, the spar that would float her out of trouble and into a healthy old age. At home, she worried, at work, she hummed.

  And Tuesday was a pleasant day, with a well-defined task to engage her attention. In the morning she made a long list of lesser-known American regional poets and their books and chapbooks, and after lunch, because her assistant was out sick, she herself went to look for them in the stacks. Usually Alice hated looking for things in the stacks, since because of the three different cataloguing systems in use in the early years of the library, works of a single author might be scattered over the seven floors. Every volume had to be looked up separately and found. After six years, Alice could not say readily where a given book might be. Almost no one could. Today, however, she didn’t mind. It was good exercise. She went from stack to stack and floor to floor, turning on the lights, finding the books, turning out the lights again. It was a fruitful search. Any number of the volumes had never been checked out, never apparently touched. Some of them fell apart in her hands. Others as old, as little used, showed only a faded spine and a film of dust as evidence of their age. Some were lost, had been shelved in the wrong spots for years, had been treated carelessly by clerks and librarians who were long gone to other institutions, to marriage and grandparenthood, to other professions, died, maybe. Alice was almost reluctant to reshelve them, mistakes were tangible marks of the past; she was being sentimental. She reshelved them.

  She thought of Henry, she thought of Susan, she thought of Rya and Jim and Noah and Ray and Jeff. She carried a little cloud of thought in her head from stack to stack and floor to floor and she hummed. When she took a pile of books to her desk, she found a note that Susan had the car out to do errands, and that she would pick her up at five. If she really wanted to take the bus, she was to call. Alice looked at the note for a long time, because, oddly, she really did want to take the bus. When she imagined herself calling Susan, though, and expressing such a thing (“Don’t be silly! It’ll be jammed! We can stop at—”) she knew it was impossible. Somehow, though, she didn’t want Susan coming there, to the library. Or Honey, either. She lived in dread of Honey’s showing up and quizzing her on the steps again. None of them! They had invaded her apartment, and she didn’t want a single one of them even looking up a book in her card catalogue. She put down Susan’s note and picked up her list of poets. Of course they were obscure, she thought angrily. None of them was any good. When she marched off to find the rest of their works (a waste of paper and shelf space!), she was as angry at them as she had been at Rya the night before.

  By four-thirty, her eyes had run over so many books and names and numbers, her fingers had separated so many bindings and pages nearly fused, that she was hardly thinking or feeling anything any more. She idly deplored this disintegration of materials, and said to herself all the clichés about what the library needed. She counted the names on her list and estimated how much of tomorrow her search would use up. She saw, as she turned out the light after herself, a flash of fabric, the heel of a shoe disappearing around one of the white metal bookstacks. It startled her, the presence of another person, no doubt one of the clerks, in someplace so obscure. Although if you thought about it, no place in this cataloguing system could be any obscurer than any other place, since at least the oldest books were arranged according to size and date of acquisition rather than according to subject or author. Alice could not help pausing and catching her breath, listening for the retreat of footsteps. There were no sounds. She walked down the aisle toward the stairs to the floor below. She could not help looking back twice. No lights went on. No one appeared.

  On the floor below, she passed a knot of clerks and nodded. Her goal was the far dark end of the dark row of stacks. She would not hesitate, nor would she turn on any lights but the lights above her destined stacks. Not in front of the clerks. But it was strange how nervous she felt, how uneven her breathing. When she came to the book she wanted, she put her hand on it, and then, almost involuntarily, she paused for a long time, staring at the brown binding, absolutely still, making no noise, hearing no noise. She shook herself and then disinterred the book from its place on the shelf. It was 4:45. She would find no more before meeting Susan.

  She thought of herself telling Susan, “I’m so paranoid lately! I thought someone was following me in the stacks!” She imagined herself laughing merrily at the very thought, Susan laughing too. She thought of Susan on Sunday, opening Alice’s bedroom door with the suddenness of—of what? The only thing that came to her mind was the suddenness of a car wreck. Suzy Soderberg. Car wrecks were on her mind. One last book. It was down another floor. When she stepped off the stairs, she saw that the whole floor was dark. The clerks would have turned off the lights, as there were no evening hours tonight. Alice quailed, but then made herself head down the aisle, turning on only every third light. The book, the last of this particular author, was as far from the steps as it could possibly be. But close to the elevator! But she had to turn off the lights! But the only footsteps she heard were her own. She walked deliberately, thinking of being late for Susan. But she could park. The book was not in its place. She considered. Check-out highly unlikely. Wrongly shelved? She read off the titles of the books above and below, left and right, but she was listening so hard that they made no sense to her. She stopped herself, closed her eyes, read them again. Now it was impossible not to pant, not to think of scary movies in which men came up behind and coshed you over the head, not to think of bullets ricocheting in the stacks, pinging on shelves, sinking into bindings and pages (and who was that clerk, Karen something, who’d been shot at from Bryant Park while she was sitting doing her work on the fourth floor or the fifth floor? The bullet came through the window and went through her hair), and then of larger disasters—flames shooting up through floors, engulfing seven stories of old paper in minutes, seconds, less time than it would take her to get to the stairs. Did she hear footsteps? There was a definite sound, step, step, step. Alice nearly passed out, but the sound receded and then stopped. She came out from behind her stack and looked down the aisle. All of the lights she had turned on had been switched off.

  She still had not found her book. She made herself read titles. She longed for the elevator. She nearly groaned. Someone could be coming up behind her. She whipped around. No one. Nothing. They wouldn’t find her for years, maybe. She inched over to the end of the stack and turned out the light. Now the floor was entirely dark. She couldn’t see, but neither could anyone else. Alice crouched beside the stack, protected, and stared down the long dark aisle. There was no sound, and only the movement of dust gathering. Alice waited.

  AND then, oddly, she came to her senses, or rather her brimming fear drained away, leaving her sheepishly squatting in the bookstacks in the dark, late for her rendezvous. She stood up, shook her hair into place, smoothed her skirt and turned on the light. It was two minutes past five. She would have thought it midnight, or five in the morning. She took a few deep breaths, and exhaled them vigorously, as if thereby blowing out the last weightless but clogging motes of what had possessed her. What had possessed her? Riding up in the elevator she considered the previous few days and it seemed to her that they were comprised of uncontrollable angers, desires, and fears, threaded together like beads on a string of uncontrollable hunger. Whe
n she wasn’t thinking about Henry, or wasn’t angry at something or fearful, she was contemplating her next meal. At night, she planned breakfast. When she ate with someone else, she wanted what they had as well as her own. When she and Susan conversed, if they didn’t reminisce or reconsider the murder, they discussed food. The elevator stopped at the ground floor, its tinny doors creaked open, and Alice stepped out. Even the main floor reading room was about deserted. As always it struck Alice as too grand for those who studied there, too grand for term papers on Sarah Orne Jewett and Nathan Hale, too grand for anything human. As she looked at it now it seemed so alien as to be almost funny. For what cause could those eleven men, was it, have possibly died, and wasn’t there one still buried in the walls? Not for the great work of preserving books, since as an edifice of book preservation, the library was not ideal. For the greater glory of Lennox, Astor, and Tilden, then? She let herself out of the librarians’ station between the reading rooms and glanced up at the spot where men had come once to scrub up the gold leaf of the vault, a vast and dangerous undertaking that trustees in the modem era had rejected as not cost effective. The experimental spot still glowed.

  Susan was waiting for her. Even as she pulled open the car door, she was apologizing for being late, explaining that she had been in the stacks. Even as she was getting in, Susan was saying she had just gotten there, had thought she was the one who was late, why she had gotten the car out today in the first place, she couldn’t imagine, except that she’d had sort of an urge to drive it. Alice sighed deeply and pleasurably with the relief of ending another workday. Susan turned to back out of her parking spot. It was good to see Susan after all, good not to go home on the bus. “What shall we eat?” Alice said. “And what percentage of the time would you say I talk about food?” Susan stomped on the brake as a motorcycle appeared immediately to her left. “Shit,” said Susan. “I’ll never get out of here.” Alice said nothing about her panic in the stacks.

  IN THE end they chose to put the car away and have done with it, then to make an omelet or something, with a spinach salad and a loaf of French bread from Zabar’s. Susan was in a good mood. While Alice sat at the table, worn out and therefore, she thought, unusually distant, Susan washed and drained the spinach three times, cut up onions and mushrooms for the omelet, mashed cloves of garlic into half a stick of butter for the French bread. She worked energetically but effortlessly, more interested in what she was talking about, which was Denny, than in what she was doing. Alice thought of other dinner-making conversations they had had, in which the dinner maker always took the lead and the table setter always listened, providing an occasional hum of agreement and encouragement, the price of not helping. Usually such times were special pleasures. Susan was saying, “I think something’s been resolved somehow, although I don’t know exactly what, or how. I do miss Denny terribly, and I think about him all the time. I mean, I cry at the store and have to go into the back. But I’m more convinced that there’s somewhere to get, and that somehow I’m getting there. Do you know what I mean?”