Duplicate Keys

by Jane Smiley

  “You know what I found out today?” he said. “That shit and science come from the same Indo-European root. No kidding. Also discern, shin, ski, shield, squire, and shiver.”

  “Henry, you make all this up.”

  “No, really. The word means to cut or split. And we all know that shitting is most basically a process of separation.”

  “Henry, I want to tell y—”

  “Alice, I love you.” He said it quickly, while she was not looking. Her mouth dropped open. She said, “It’s only been since Saturday. You don’t know anything about me,” but in spite of her best intentions, she failed to sound brisk or businesslike.

  “I was in love with you Sunday morning.”

  “Oh, Henry. Come on. I catalogue books. I don’t know how to dress. I talk too much about my first husband. My hobbies are uncreative. I wasn’t smart enough to go to medical school or even law school.”

  “You can’t talk me out of it.”

  “I don’t know if I can reciprocate.”

  “That’s partly what I love about you. You consider things. I just do things, like I’m driving a train, or something. The tracks are down, the engine gets stoked up, and off I go, eating up the miles, never turning aside, hardly ever looking out the window. I love the way you eat, and the way you talk to me at the table. You take a bite, and then you sit back and chew it, and then you swallow it and take another one. I say something to you and I can see you listening and thinking about it, you lift one finger, as if for silence, and then you speak very consideringly. When I was a senior in high school, my mother used to make me eat everything with chopsticks because I was eating so fast. Even birthday cake. I ate birthday cake at my eighteenth birthday with chopsticks. Except I got proficient enough with them to eat too fast after a while.”

  “But I don’t know if I can reciprocate.”

  “But when you do know, you really will.”

  “But what if I never do know? This scares me.”

  “You’ll know.”

  “You sound very self-confident.”

  “One of my compelling qualities.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right.” Alice was panting. Henry pushed the hair off her forehead and kissed her hard.

  IT WAS one of those long nights of awaking into desire, making love, falling asleep, bumping into one another, and awaking into desire again. When Alice’s eyes opened permanently, it was still dark. Henry was in love with her. Food was out all over the house. Alice got up as carefully as possible and went into the living room. She seemed to have been at Henry’s for ten years. It was ten after three. With the best of intentions about clearing the table and putting the food away, she stood idly by the window, not trying to sort out her thoughts, for that would be impossible, but trying to think them one at a time. The moon, which must have been above and behind Henry’s building, shone with penetrating whiteness upon the windows of her apartment, into them, in fact. She could make out any number of things, including the sandals she had worn to work, which she had left on the kitchen floor while washing the raspberries. From this angle, with this full moon, her apartment was wide open. It was disconcerting, but not nearly so disconcerting as Henry’s declaration of love. The possibility of his friendship, of his good advice, of a concentrated focus on her tangle of ignorance now seemed hopelessly remote. While she talked he would look at her hair or her breasts. His advice would be too quick and enthusiastic, too colored by the vividness of his new feelings and his wish to protect them. It was not a matter of trying. Henry would try hard to be calm and objective, but in Alice’s limited experience, lovers were as often adversaries of a sort as they were friends. In addition, there was her undutiful self, who could think with some perspective, who could panic and hesitate under the weight of someone’s love, but only if the lover was not in the room. She was doomed to reciprocate on the first eligible occasion. Whether or not it was Henry she adored, it was certain that she did adore, that she shivered with delight every time she thought of Henry actually saying, “Alice, I love you.”

  And then there was something else. There was no way of knowing whether Henry loved something permanent, some knob of her being that was her forever, or whether he loved a mood engendered in her by recent events. She and Henry had lived on the same block for a year at least and he couldn’t remember seeing her before. Maybe the murder was a sort of isotope that made her transiently visible, that would halve its life and fade. She was different in many ways these last ten days—more emotional, more afraid, less routine, but when the events washed off, she was sure that their dye would, too. Henry would perhaps be disappointed at the paler Alice, the Alice that really did work at the library and visit museums and talk to her parents every two weeks and spend whole days thinking about books and food.

  And what did she think of Henry?

  There was a movement in her apartment. She stood up in surprise and leaned against the windowpane. There certainly had been a movement in her apartment, something white above the floor had moved from the dining room to the kitchen. Whatever it was stayed back from the window and Alice didn’t see it again. Her body had gone cold, and now was covered with goosebumps. There was something in her apartment! Someone, really. Someone in a white shirt that reflected the moonlight. She looked in each window systematically, starting in the laundry room, then the living room, then the dining room, then the kitchen. Whoever it was didn’t appear again, but there had been something odd—the sandals. The sandals in the kitchen that had been right in the middle of the floor were off to one side and separated. Whoever it was had stumbled over them and kicked them. Alice put her hand on the window frame and gripped it tightly. The clock on Henry’s coffeetable read 3:25. Alice dragged her eyes from the clock and back to the darkened windows across the street. She watched for a long time. There were no lights, no movements, but also no appearances at the street entrance, the only way besides the fire escape of getting out of her building.

  After a while of staring, what she had seen came to seem impossible, and she couldn’t remember where the sandals had really been. She made herself look again for the glint of white through the kitchen window, but the moon had moved. Now it reflected off the glass. She glanced at the clock, then regretted it, certain she had missed something. The downstairs entrance opened and Alice inhaled deeply, but it was no one, some man from upstairs she had seen with his wife half a dozen times. He was wearing a dark suit, anyway, and carrying an overnight bag.

  She longed to creep back to bed and snuggle up to Henry’s back, to abandon her apartment and everything in it, but the sense that the scene had not yet played itself out kept her where she was. Something would appear, above or below. She leaned her elbows on the glass and yawned, then made herself look for the pale shape of the sandals again, to shock herself awake, but she could see nothing. How could they know she wouldn’t be there? No one knew that except Henry.

  Inexorably, the stillness across the street grew boring, and her concentration began to fail. The buildings in her peripheral vision began to change shape, first expanding, then contracting. Her corneas seemed to dry out. She closed her eyes for a second and then opened them without knowing how long she had failed to watch. When she opened them, she understood. Obviously, her night-time visitor was Susan, the only person with a key. It was almost light. She had fallen asleep. She turned to the clock, which read five minutes of five, took a deep breath of relief, and began to pick up items from the table and carry them into the kitchen.

  At ten-thirty, she called Susan at the store and fished for an admission that she had come over in the night and stayed, or looked for her, or anything. But Susan was cool and innocent, and by eleven, perched at the reference desk, Alice was inclined to view the separated sandals as the result of too little sleep, too much champagne, or a trick of the moonlight. The phone rang at her elbow, and when she picked it up, Rya’s voice asked for her. “This is me, Rya, what’s up?”

  “Alice.”

  “What’s the ma
tter, Rya, are you crying?”

  “That guy went over, that detective, and they took Noah and arrested him. He called me from the station.” She sniffled.

  Alice made sympathetic noises, but was afraid to speak, her spirits lifting by the moment. Then she remembered to say, “What are the charges?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rya was whispering, “but I think murder.” Alice could barely hear her, but even so the words made her skin tingle. She said, “They’ve got to have evidence. They surely don’t have any evidence.”

  “They had something. Honey came to my office yesterday and asked me about whether I’d tried to call home that night.”

  Alice flushed. He would have gone immediately from her to Rya. “That seems like pretty slim evidence.”

  “There’s something else. They didn’t say what it was. Anyway, they’re moving him around, but maybe Honey would let you see him, and Noah would see you. I don’t think he wants to see me.”

  “Why me? I don’t see that it’s any more my business than anyone else’s.”

  “Please?”

  “I don’t want to, Rya. I just don’t want to. I’m sure they won’t let me see him anyway. They never want people to get together on their alibis.”

  “Maybe Noah doesn’t have an alibi. But please? I can’t think of anyone else.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “How did I get myself into this?”

  “I ask myself that every day, Rya.”

  “Will you call me?”

  “After I’ve thought about it. But I’m sure they won’t let me.”

  She was right. At the Twentieth Precinct, they wouldn’t even tell her where Noah was, and Honey was out and would be for the rest of the day. Alice tried to imagine him authoritative, making an arrest, clamping on the cuffs. It was easy. He could have done it to her, to Susan, to anyone. He had done it to Noah. That was a relief. Even if he got convicted, and with the sort of evidence Rya knew about that was unlikely, he would surely be out in ten years or so. Good behavior would be automatic to Noah, and supposedly the prisons were full of dope. They obviously wouldn’t send him to someplace like Attica; he was harmless. She would testify to that herself. He could start a prison music program, gain a social consciousness. It wouldn’t be so bad. People thought that prison was the end of life, but really it was just a new life, with its own interests and concerns. Noah might be good at it, better at it than, say, Susan. She thanked the officer at the desk, left a message for Honey, and went out. It was another beautiful day, she inhaled deeply, she turned toward the park, Henry was in love with her, he couldn’t see her tonight but Saturday they would have the whole day. By Central Park West (the light changed, she stepped into the street), she was so despondent that she could hardly breathe. She thought of lying down in the center of the road, doing it suddenly, before any oncoming car would have time to brake, before she would have time to think about it or feel it. But of course her foot lifted onto the curb without even a hitch in rhythm, and her steps carried her in the sunlight down toward Columbus Circle, where she could get something to eat. She thought of herself in the last ten or twelve days, borne on the flood of thought, anxious, angry, upset, but alive. Now she felt dead, thoughtless, a walking paralytic, all feelings, all concerns locked immobile like gears forced together within. She bought a hot dog with sauerkraut and walked down Fifty-ninth Street.

  10

  WHEN she got back to her apartment at the usual time, Susan was there, and she was carrying a bag of groceries. Actually, she was not in Alice’s apartment, Alice noticed, merely in the hall, as if she had just arrived. She seemed rather ebullient, showing Alice the food she had bought, exclaiming about how hungry she was, complimenting Alice on her skirt and blouse, marvelling at the continued good weather. “Did you hear about Noah?” Alice said, but Susan was preceding her through the door and Alice couldn’t see her face.

  “Rya called me. She said you were going over to see him. I told her to come by, but she said she couldn’t make it until after dinner.”

  “I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t even see Honey.”

  “I’ll make a hollandaise for this.”

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “No.”

  Alice began to be afraid again. “I’ve been terribly depressed all afternoon.” She raised her voice slightly at the end, to encourage Susan to confide the same thing. All Susan said was “Really?”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Our friend has been arrested!”

  “Honestly, that doesn’t depress me. It’s irrelevant. He’ll be out sooner or later. Honey obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing, which rather depresses me, but Noah I’m not worried about. He’s been crazy lately. Something concrete, some kind of action from outside will perk him up. People are always happy when they’re actually being victimized.”

  “But what if he did it?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Rya doesn’t think so.”

  “Rya has always attributed a lot of force to Noah’s character that just isn’t there. Here, wash these.” She handed Alice a package of chicken breasts. Alice tore off the wrappings. “He would never have the self-assurance, especially to face down Craig.” She began rolling the washed breasts in flour. Alice’s head was throbbing with pain. She sat down.

  Susan went on. “I’ve figured out a lot of things.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve figured out why they never got big.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well, I’m convinced that if they’d ever gotten as successful as Craig wanted to get, they would never have been killed. I’ve thought a lot about it, the relationship of their murder to their exact degree of success. I’m sure it wasn’t random or inevitable, but maybe it was unavoidable.”

  “I’m so tired of talking about it and thinking about it.”

  “That’s because you’re having only a welter of thoughts. If you—”

  “It’s because I can’t bear that it happened!”

  Susan looked at her, then went back to sautéing the chicken. It was Alice’s favorite recipe, one Jim Ellis had taught her and she had taught Susan. Boned chicken breasts floured and sautéed in butter, then smothered in a sauce of cream, chicken drippings, and lemon juice. Very simple. Susan was bribing her. Also in the bag were chocolate pastries from Zabar’s, one of her weaknesses. Alice closed her eyes. In a moment she heard the clink of a glass on the table, and opened them upon a glass of white wine. She took a sip. Susan lifted the last golden piece of meat out of the pan and turned off the flame. Then she turned to Alice and put her hands on her hips. “You seem to think that this means nothing to me.”

  “I don’t mean to imply that. I’m sorry if—”

  “Denny’s mother calls me nearly every day. Did I send the clothes? The clothes got there. Do I mind who gets what, isn’t there anything else that I want to keep, there are some letters of mine from way back that Denny had at home, every little thing, but mostly she, or one of the sisters or brothers, just wants to hear it again. They can’t believe it. Well, I can’t believe it either. It only sinks in bit by bit, as I think about why it was, and what might have led up to it. Some guy off the street didn’t just come in and blow them away. Whatever happened was the culmination of something.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “It’s not crazy or senseless, that’s the point! Things led up to it, step by logical step. Every detail is significant. And it’s not just significant in terms of what happened, it’s significant to me, to my peace of mind, to my being able to go on from this. I’m the one who’s got to know why it happened, I’m the one who’s got to think about it. I can’t wait for Honey to file a report!”

  “Actually, today when Rya called and told me that they had arrested Noah, I was almost happy. I couldn’t bear being happy, or feeling good that Noah had done it, or at least that they thought Noah had done it. I was so s
ure that the result of the investigation would be worse. Much worse. And it seemed almost appropriate that Noah should be the one, if you know what I mean. I could survive Noah.”

  “Who couldn’t you survive?”

  “Well.” Alice looked steadily at her friend. “When, uh, Honey first talked to me after I found them, I thought it was going to be me. I thought he could convince me of anything.” She laughed, Susan did not. Alice began to eat.

  After a few seconds, Susan cleared her throat and said, “I think that the first year after we got here was the worst. I thought it was great then, but now I remember it, and all I can picture is sitting around the living room with these greasy guys from the record company, planning out a strategy. Craig and Denny were horribly enthusiastic. Craig used to sit practically on top of the guy and stare into his face. Denny wasn’t much better. There were the Eagles on the Coast and there were the guys, two bands, dueling it out for national primacy. Even though he’d never met the Eagles, Craig used to call them by their first names. I hated it, and teased him about it, but he couldn’t help it. Once I said, ‘None of the Eagles calls you by your first names!’ but he didn’t bat an eyelid, just said, ‘They will by Christmas.’”

  “The record company was very encouraging. How could they help being hopeful?”

  Susan scowled. “And then they got booked into smaller and smaller gigs. Oh, yeah, first it was the Bottom Line and all that, with the company making the deals, but then it was supper clubs out in New Rochelle, playing for the country set, and then it was towns in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and the guys were doing their own hustling. By then everyone realized that good old Dinah was off the charts, not even in the top hundred, and that the album had shot only to sixty-nine anyway, before plummeting. Who cared, the next one would burn everybody up. They made up songs around the dinner table. Denny kept a pad for lines of songs by the bed. They got stoned, they didn’t get stoned, they got drunk, they didn’t get drunk, they composed by themselves and they brainstormed with each other and Noah and even Ray. Denny practiced new riffs by the hour, except that he got them off other people’s records! He’d practice it and get it right, but it wasn’t new, it wasn’t his. I felt sick all the time. When they walked in the door, my chest would get tight and my heart would start pounding or I’d want to throw up for fear of what they were going to say. I’ve never seen two people have so much hope about anything! And then the record company was rude to Craig, and he broke the contract, and they didn’t even get to finish recording the second album. But of course they could get something with another company, no problem, all these guys were interested, all these guys had approached them, except it was like magic. There was no one. No matter what they did or how hard they worked, no one was going to record them again. It was like one of those old movies where someone says, I’ll see that you never have a job in this town again. I couldn’t believe it at first. And they never did believe it. Or, they believed it, but they acted like it was magic. Craig always thought it could turn around at any moment. Just the right move, something as simple as wearing the right shirt to a gig could turn it around. Going to Studio Midtown on the right afternoon and falling into conversation with the right guy, coming up with the right kind of lyric, just one line, something with real punch. Craig always thought that it was a tiny little thing that was keeping him out, and if he only found it, then he would be in again. And it wasn’t just the music business, it was the cosmos, or luck, or karma. Anything could get him back in, like being a vegetarian, and anything could keep him out, like being a vegetarian.”