Duplicate Keys

by Jane Smiley

  “Not exactly.” Alice glanced out the window, hoping for a sudden and miraculous look at Henry Mullet. She was hardly her loyal self, was oddly removed from Susan and the familiar enchantment with her conversation. She thought again and again of her panic in the stacks, and it seemed almost as frightening as a real attack would have been. Fear had paralyzed her, rendered her incapable of thought as well as action. Her only instinct had been to crouch, to cover her head. It was intolerable to anticipate a life whose dangers were immeasurably amplified by such a reaction. But the thought, once thought, slipped away. She was worn out.

  “If I knew what I meant, I could tell you, maybe, but I don’t. That’s the weirdest thing about it. Something about our life was annoying me.” She glanced up quickly. “It had nothing to do with anything I was supposed to be feeling. It was like some little barb that kept hooking me. Every time I thought of Denny, or Craig, or all of us together, it hooked me and sank into me, and made me mad and hurt me at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

  “In a way.”

  “Now I know what the hook is, which doesn’t get rid of it, but at least I can see it, whereas before it was invisible. Now I can see that it was a part of things, but then it seemed to infect them, like poison ivy. Everything seemed impossible, the way it does when you have poison ivy all over your body, but now it doesn’t. I mean in retrospect. I suppose it’s odd that just understanding it should have such an effect on me, since the whole situation is changed now, but it’s such a relief to know that something was a certain way and not a certain other way.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alice sounded rather sharp, but Susan didn’t seem to notice.

  “What did Craig give you this year for Christmas?”

  “Don’t you remember? That Halston blouse.”

  “I remember. And he gave me an ounce of Joy perfume.”

  “So what?”

  “Remember where he said he got the money?”

  “They had all those gigs between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that guy in Bridgeport gave each one a hundred-dollar tip, that drunk guy.”

  “They did have all those gigs, but Craig spent that money on drugs. Denny told me after Christmas that the weekend before Christmas he ‘loaned’ Craig a thousand dollars from our joint account, to pay off a debt that was about to get him in real trouble. I didn’t dare ask what the trouble was, but I don’t think it was drugs. Except that the debt was only partly paid, because Craig had the money in his pocket on Christmas Eve, and he was in midtown, and you know the rest.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Now, that doesn’t make me mad any more.” Susan threw the vegetables into the bubbling butter. “Really it doesn’t. We gave him three hundred more, and he paid it off. We used to fight about it, though. We lent a lot of money to Craig, and last night, just as an experiment, I sat down and figured it up, only cash, subtracting all the money he lent us or paid back. It came to fifty-seven hundred dollars. Hand me those eggs, will you?” Alice got up and carried the bowl of lemon-colored eggs over to the stove. “I looked at that figure for a long time. It seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it? But we knew him for thirteen years, and that’s only just over four hundred a year, or, say, eight-fifty a week. Cigarette money, beer money. And that’s where it would have gone if we hadn’t lent it to him. Shall I try to flip this?” Still Susan sounded cheerful. Alice had never seen her speak of Craig with such equanimity. “Yes, I like it cooked all through.”

  There was a pause while Susan slid the omelet to the front of the pan, then eased it over. “Beautiful,” said Alice.

  “I’d thought I was burning up about that money all these years, but when I added it all up and really looked at the figures, I realized I didn’t care.”

  “Well, it did symbolize your rivalry with Craig. I mean, Denny was giving something of yours to him—”

  “No, I thought about that, too.” She slipped a table knife through the steaming fold of egg, then separated the two halves. She bent down and took the bread from the oven. Alice reached across the table for the salad, wanting to shake her head furiously to clear it, to fasten her attention with screws or nails to what Susan was saying. Perhaps panic had a chemical effect on the brain, some dissolving of cortical tissue. Susan pulled out her chair and sat down.

  “Denny wasn’t blindly uncritical of Craig, you know. And he wasn’t without a temper, even though nobody saw it except me. About six months after we met, something happened that I should have paid attention to. The three of us were eating dinner. No, there were four. Craig was seeing that Chinese girl whose father was with the embassy, remember her?”

  “Helen Huang.”

  “Right. So the four of us were eating dinner. Craig had the only car, then, and he asked me if I needed it for anything the next day. I thought for a minute, and he asked me again. I opened my mouth to say something, and he asked me again, this time sort of barking. Denny wasn’t paying attention, but Helen looked up at me. I think I even managed to say ‘I’ or something, but Craig interrupted me and said, ‘Well, shit, Susan, do you want the fucking car or not? If you do, then this time you can put some fucking gas in it.’ I must have inhaled sharply or something, because Denny, who was sitting beside me, looked up and said in a warning voice, ‘Susan!’ This whole time I’d had my fork in my hand, ready to start eating, and I just turned the fork in my fist and I stabbed Denny right in the arm. It drew blood. I wanted it to draw blood. Well, we jumped up and we screamed at each other and ran into the bedroom and cried, and it was all very dramatic, and Helen, who was raised in a very traditional Chinese family, was floored. At the time it seemed very passionate and exciting, and I cried, though not as much as Denny, and mostly because it felt good to be sort of swept away, you know. I bandaged his arm, and we had this melodramatic reconciliation, and all the ferment seemed to be between Denny and me. But it wasn’t. I should have paid attention to that.”

  Something about this scene Alice vaguely remembered, but the overlay of her present image was far more vivid. The fork turning in Susan’s hand, sinking into Denny’s arm, the blood spurting (or probably dribbling) out. It was completely believable and there wouldn’t be any remorse. Susan was a remarkably pragmatic and not very remorseful person, after all. Alice said, “Did you—”

  “There was another time, a few years later, when they had been practicing a bunch of new songs all summer. Nobody had any money, not even you.”

  Alice wondered if she had always seemed to have money, if she had been generous enough with it.

  “They rehearsed day after day, all day, and Denny was mad at Craig because he wouldn’t sing this right, or he kept coming in wrong on that, and then blaming their bad sound on Denny. He’d be nice and apologetic to Craig all day, because temper didn’t get anywhere with him, and then he’d come home and scream at the cats and scream at me, and once he kicked the glass out of the back door, except he was so embarrassed about it that he told me for weeks that the wind had done it, and then he cried when he told me really he had. I don’t know why I didn’t—”

  “But what does raking all this up teach you?”

  “I don’t know, but listen. One time last fall I came home late. I remember I was in a terrible mood because Madame and Monsieur had been there all day, half sitting around and half interfering with the salesgirls, and blah blah. Denny was watching some football game on TV, and when I got home, I realized that he’d had about six beers. I was glad to get home, and he was glad to see me, but we started joking around, and he started pulling at my clothes, which he never did, and which I hated. I asked him to stop, and if he hadn’t been drinking, he would have, and we would have gone to bed and screwed and gotten a good night’s sleep and felt perfect forever after, but instead he got mad and grabbed the front of my shirt and deliberately ripped it open, popping all the buttons. Well, I knew he was drunk, so I was going to put on a show of being indignant and leave it at that when he said, ‘You are a cold bitch,’ just lik
e that, not as if he’d just thought about it, but as if he’d discussed it with someone. Those weren’t his words. He’d never called me any kind of name, even when we were really mad at each other, and now he was calling me somebody else’s names, Craig’s names, and all of a sudden I had this vision of them discussing me, and it was a vision that went all the way back to the beginning, and it drove me crazy.”

  “But of course they discussed you. You and I have always discussed them.” The food was gone, even the bread. Alice looked toward the refrigerator, wondering what might be in there for dessert.

  “But we’ve never discussed Denny and me, not really. Have we? You don’t know what kind of lover he is, I don’t talk about our problems or our fights, do I?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “That was a conscious decision on my part, you know.”

  “You have been very discreet, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t gathered things.”

  “What you gathered is your own affair.”

  Alice nodded, remembering occasions, numerous occasions, of approaching delicately about something, of fishing for a confidence if one needed to be given. It was such a pattern with them that she privately referred to it as her “prying with a fork” manner, since she most often did it over a meal. She said, “So what’s the conclusion? What did you think was true that you don’t think is true now?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll laugh. I never said it to you then, because every time I said the words aloud, they sounded stupid.”

  “Well, what?”

  “What I thought then was that Craig had some sort of power over us. When we were doing all that astrology, I thought it was because he was a double Scorpio. Later I didn’t know why, but it seemed like he was manipulating us, Denny especially. Sometimes Denny was just sort of his creature.”

  “Last night—” But Alice stopped before divulging Rya’s remarks on the same topic. She said, “So what seems true now?”

  “That he was just a guy. A pretty compelling guy who usually got his own way, but just a guy.”

  “That’s your revelation?”

  “It doesn’t sound like much, does it?”

  “Not especially.”

  “Well, now you know how deeply I believed the other thing.”

  “My dear, you should have slept with him. You would have known he was compelling, but not omnipotent by any means.”

  Susan laughed. Realizing what she had said, Alice shrugged and began to laugh herself. “Yes, true!” she exclaimed. They sat in their chairs, laughing. When she got up to go to the bathroom, though, closing the door, and sitting on the cold seat, Alice stopped laughing and began to shiver, from the coldness of the seat, she thought. She finished, washed her hands, then washed them again. She washed her face in hot hot water, but she was still shivering. In fact her teeth were chattering. She looked into the mirror, concentrating on her face without seeing it, but not thinking about the stories Susan had just told her. In a moment, she took off her clothes and turned on the shower, very hot. Five minutes of the running water over her head, down her stomach and back, stilled the shivering. She huddled into her warmest robe. When she got back to the kitchen, Susan had finished the dishes. She was sitting at the table smoking a cigarette. According to the ashtray it was her third, and she was no longer laughing, either. Alice said, “I have had the craziest couple of days. I am out of it. When I wake up tomorrow morning, I probably won’t even remember you were here.”

  Susan smiled without showing any teeth. “It’s been fun,” she said. “Tonight I hate to leave.”

  “It’s still light. I’m really ready for bed, though.”

  “I can see that.” She smiled again, in that funny, rueful, and hardly comradely way.

  Alice coughed. “Let me call you tomorrow. At the store. We’ll arrange something.”

  Susan stood up, actually stood up, stubbing out her cigarette thoroughly and thoughtfully. “I’ve always felt welcome to stay before.”

  “You would be if anyone was, you know that.”

  Susan shrugged, but she was, after all, nearly out the door. Alice closed it behind her, and then leaned against it for a long time. A while later, after the fall of complete dark, she pulled on a pair of jeans, took her keys, and went across the street. When Henry Mullet opened his door for her (grinning, Alice noted with relief), she said, “Mind if I’m a little early?”

  9

  THERE was something very agreeable, Alice thought, about waking up in someone else’s very private apartment and knowing that you would be back there again, no angling for an invitation, no weighing of his words and looks to detect how welcome you would be, that very evening. Henry was matter of fact, cheery, and handsome in the morning, his rooms were platinum with sunlight. She tottered naked into his bathroom to find that he had set out for her next to the shower a clean yellow towel, folded, a flowered washcloth, and a new bar of soap. She took a shower, not somthing she usually had time for in the morning, and emerged wide awake, a sensation she customarily eased into about an hour into the workday. She had only awakened once in the night to think of Susan in the dark and to be seized with nausea. Washing her face in the sink and helping herself to Henry’s toothbrush, she was inclined to view such a reaction as feverish, engendered by their closeness or by her recent roller coaster emotions. Henry embraced her as she came out of the bathroom. “I’m very fond of the way you walk around naked,” he said.

  “No shame, I admit. Although I’ll also admit that I once wondered if you had seen me wandering bareass around my apartment in oblivious splendor. That’s the penalty of befriending neighbors in New York, I think.”

  “I haven’t, but I’ll certainly keep my eyes peeled.”

  “I somehow suspect you won’t have to.”

  Henry chuckled happily. He had made coffee. The dishes from the night before, which Alice had seen beside the sink, were washed. A round, cold, golden grapefruit blushed with rose at the stem end sat in the middle of the kitchen table like a bouquet of flowers. At two places were folded paper napkins and grapefruit spoons. Susan seemed a continent away. “I haven’t got much,” said Henry. “I always eat the same thing for breakfast, and I can’t imagine that you’d like it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Grape Nuts.”

  “I like Grape Nuts.”

  “Without milk. I don’t like milk, and I don’t have a drop in the house.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  As if to demonstrate, he poured out a bowl of little grains, and began to grind them, spoonful by spoonful, between his teeth. Alice said, “That’s how the Roman army lost its teeth, you know,” but she shivered with delight. She adored him again, and she could adore him all day with the security of getting hungry for a big meal. “Cut the grapefruit,” he said. “I had one yesterday, and they’re very sweet.”

  “I won’t say what comes to my lips.”

  “What?”

  “Instead, I’ll say that I could have you for breakfast, with pleasure.”

  “And I you.” He reached across the table for her hand and kissed her fingers one by one.

  “Thank you. What time is it, anyway?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  “Surely you jest.”

  “Surely not. I have to be on the train by seven.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen six-thirty with such clarity in my whole life.”

  “Do you think it’s love?”

  Alice spoke lightly, sorry he had brought it up. “No. I don’t see that with any clarity at all.”

  Henry continued to grind.

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I don’t know. I feel good though.”

  “Me, too.”

  By the time he left for work, and Alice left to get clothes at her apartment, it seemed as if they had wedged a whole leisurely Sunday morning into a time that usually wasn’t even a part of Alice’s day.

  At noon one of the other L-2’s from the reading room cam
e to find her in the periodicals catalogue and tell her that a man was asking for her at the desk. She could not help assuming it was Henry, but the grin faded when she saw Detective Honey leaning on the desk and surveying the reference room with his professional eye. He looked out of place, as if he felt superior to mere dictionaries and encyclopedias. Annoyed, Alice snapped, “People are waiting to use this desk. We should go outside.”

  Honey smiled, however, apparently not even noticing her tone. “How are you?”

  “Let’s go out on the steps.” And then, “If you must know, it’s irritating to have you come here.”

  “I just have a few questions.”

  “Fine.” On the steps, Alice crossed her arms in front of her chest and smiled politely.

  Honey opened his notebook. “First, you’ve probably been wondering about Mr. Reschley.” Alice nodded. “We still haven’t gotten in touch with him, but we are pretty sure he’s in Miami, or was yesterday morning. In addition to being recognized almost positively in the airport, he’s been reported in a nightclub, and on the street, in the company of a man who is, shall we say, familiar to this department.” Alice dared not say a word, but she lifted her eyebrows. Honey went on, “As long as we know where he is, we have no reason to get in touch with him at the moment.”