Duplicate Keys

by Jane Smiley

  “I remember when he was a vegetarian.”

  “Shit, we went round and round about that one. He was bad to eat the flesh of animals, evil. His whole system was contaminated and he lived on a polluted plane of being. But then he changed his mind. Rock and roll demanded a certain destructive energy that could only come from eating meat. He thought if he matched his being perfectly to the spirit of rock and roll, they would meld, and he would get another recording contract.”

  “He was a little crazy about it.”

  “He thought it was just around the corner. Months and years elapsed and still it was just around the corner. Before I left for the Adirondacks, one of the last conversations I heard him have with Denny was about how giving up their first contract had really been the right thing to do, they couldn’t let those bastards treat him like that, just like it happened the day before, not five years before. Can you believe it? It made my skin creep.”

  “Craig was definitely a little monomaniacal.”

  Susan went back to dipping artichoke leaves into the hollandaise and scraping them on her teeth. Alice was breathing heavily. Susan was not finished, however. “I don’t blame them any more, though,” she said. “I blamed them all those years for playing the wrong sort of music or learning the wrong riffs or writing bad songs. And of course I blamed them for being so never say die about everything. For caring so much every time they ran into a producer at a party or met someone who might be able to help them. There was a way that Craig said certain names, always first names, that was a sure signal that he was counting on this person, adoring this person. It always ended with the person being a shit after all. I don’t know which was worse, the hope or the disappointment. And even when I vowed to myself not to pay any attention it was like water rising and falling around me. I couldn’t vow not to get wet.”

  “You paint this in such vivid colors! I remember that they wanted to get ahead. Jim wanted to have his poems in The New Yorker, too—” She trailed off skeptically.

  “You weren’t there, you weren’t around. You had your own life. Besides, this was for inside the house only. Do you think our Craig Shellady would have admitted failure on the street? Especially when Jim did get a poem in The New Yorker and Ray did start to get a lot of work with better-known bands?” She pushed the bowl of spent artichoke leaves away from her and went on. “But now I see it wasn’t their fault! They couldn’t have done anything. They were behind the tip of the wave for their style of music, and the time had passed, even before we got here, when every good band was going to be recorded. It all shrank, and they were left out. It was a historical force! Inflation! Oil! Changing tastes! So what that they were good and wanted success more than life itself!”

  “How did that kill them?”

  “You can’t understand it. The very air of the apartment was thick. It was like walking through mayonnaise, trying to breathe mayonnaise. Craig was there incessantly. I’d make Denny promise not to talk about it for one night, or one morning, but Craig would just hammer at him until he fell apart. Talking to Denny was like talking to himself, and I’d been around so long that I wasn’t even there.” The sound of the downstairs buzzer startled them and the bustle of Rya’s overwrought arrival prevented Susan from going on, rather to Alice’s relief. Rya was carrying a suitcase. “I can’t stay,” she said. “I have a late plane to Houston.” She thrust out her chin. “I’ve just got to get away. Noah won’t talk to me. I can’t stand it. Anyway, Detective Honey said I could go see my parents for a week, and I got on the plane. It was the last seat until Saturday, so I thought I’d better take it. Noah’s being arraigned or indicted or one of those tomorrow afternoon. Do you hate me?”

  Susan stood up and began taking the dishes to the sink. Alice said, “I thought you hadn’t spoken to your parents in six months.”

  “I called them this morning. My daddy would rather have me home, anyway.”

  “What about work?” Susan spoke coolly, as if she disapproved. Alice didn’t disapprove.

  “They gave me time off. David’s been wonderful. He even offered to get Noah a lawyer.”

  “Well, why not go?” said Susan. “Why the hell not?”

  “The weather’s going to be awful, and under normal circumstances, of course, I’d rather be with Noah, but he won’t see me. I don’t see what good staying around would do.”

  Alice shrugged.

  “Well, I’ve got to catch the plane. There should be a cab on West End.”

  “What airport?”

  “Kennedy, but I’ll be glad to drop you. It’s late.”

  Susan wiped her hands on a dish towel and then they were gone.

  THE first time Alice let herself think about the possible visitor of the night before was when she woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t help it. It was then, when she was trying to recall the exact shape and character of the whiteness she thought she had detected through the window—the laundry room window—that the full realization that Susan had done the murders floated into her thoughts. It was not Denny who had been murdered with Craig, but Craig who had been murdered with Denny. In Denny’s apartment, Denny was the intended victim. The knowledge came so smoothly, so much like old business, that Alice stretched, turned over, and rearranged the blanket before beginning to react, to feel sick, to tremble and fidget, to perspire. She pushed back the covers and went into the bathroom.

  Getting it down was like swallowing a whole boiled egg, extra large, with the shell on. She would do anything, think of anything (Hugh and Doreen, each of her four grandparents, Henry, Noah, her obscure poets, whether there was enough on her Master Charge to buy a lot of new clothes) rather than choke it down. She stood by the bathroom window, looking down on the empty street.

  The insane thing was that it didn’t make her admire Susan less. It was not like discovering some new friend had supported the Vietnam War to the end, or really believed that black people were inferior. And it seemed that nothing about her revelation could impel her to extricate herself from the friendship. Could a tree of its own volition pull itself up, root hair by root hair? What did Susan say, that Noah didn’t have the force of character to confront Craig? And did Susan?

  The hard-boiled egg only half swallowed, she turned on the light and got into the shower. It was not even dawn yet. She longed to be at the library. As the water poured over her, she imagined herself a little house in the inner court, two little rooms, one on top of the other with a ladder between them that could be pulled after herself when she was upstairs. Thick carpets the color of grass on the floors and bright flowered wallpaper, stacks of yam for knitting and fabric for sewing and books for reading and symphonies, string quartets, concertos, sonatas, cantatas, oratorios to listen to, something mindless to work at like making license plates and the library rising around her, cutting off her view like a thorny thick forest.

  When she got out of the shower, she looked out the window at Henry’s apartment. He hadn’t called after Susan’s departure. She had known he would not and now the telepathy didn’t work as it had. No lights came on; he would be asleep, fortifying himself for grafting trees or pruning them or something else equally guiltless. She went naked into her bedroom and picked up the phone, but then put it down. It was not until then that she began to wonder about the practicalities of Susan’s act, about the practical side of the act itself. She had been there, she had even walked around, but in a daze, seeing only the spectacle, unable to comprehend the scene. No wonder Honey had been exasperated. She thought of Susan with him, self-assured, unimpressed. Did Honey find it as easy as Alice did to imagine Susan carrying out the details of her plan: purchasing the weapon, arranging gasoline for the car, covering her entrance into the city and her exit with the anonymous comings and goings all around her, using her very familiarity with the apartment and with the habits of Denny and Craig as her most deadly weapon. Or did that vision only come with years of experiencing her friend, watching how neatly and patiently she arranged things, the d
eftness of her fingers, and her plans, always precise and unhurried, unfidgeted, unaffected by frustration or boredom, so that she could unpick a complicated seam two or three times and still hum to herself, so that she could arrange nearly a whole window full of clothes, and then change her mind and do it over without wanting to smash the glass. And could Susan actually have bought and held and finally fired such a gun, a gun that created the mess that Alice found? Alice tried to imagine the feeling of that black-edged thing coming into her hand but she could not. Into Susan’s hand? Yes. Susan’s hands were as big as hers, and wider, stronger, although perhaps you didn’t have to be particularly strong to fire one, only to have the intention of firing one.

  She sat down on her bed, then slumped backward, thinking of the last party she had given in this very apartment. Everywhere she looked she had seen an intimate. Susan, Denny, Craig, Ray, Noah, Rya, distributed about the gathering like ripe peaches, a richness, comfortable, handsome, interesting. Craig had brought her some daffodils, snitched from the park or someone’s private bed, but yellow and sweet. Denny had smacked her on the butt. Were any of the others less lost than these dead ones? She felt herself being sucked friendless into the future, against her will, almost as she had felt when she first realized Jim would leave her for Mariana, except that in this case there was no promised relief, no wound for time to heal. These difficulties were both drier and more permanent, and they made her feel older than mere betrayal had, permanently older. But who cared about that? This she hated about herself, this sea of self-absorption, out of which her intelligence rose only sometimes, like a periscope. After a long numb interval, she stood and began to dress.

  There was still no seeing Noah. The unknown officers at the Twentieth Precinct didn’t even know where he was, or said they didn’t. Honey would be in touch with her, they thought. She left her name and phone number.

  AT WORK she was not unhappy. She was sure the evidence against Noah, however it might distract Honey, could not be sufficient for a conviction. Against Susan there was no evidence, only a feeling on Alice’s part borne of confusing conversations and 3 a.m. hallucinations. Every time she thought of the scene, of the motive, of the opportunity, nothing told against Susan, no fact damned her, nothing about her threw all the fragments into alignment. Although Alice’s conviction of Susan’s guilt remained unshaken, everything ameliorated it. After work she ran into Henry on the corner of Eighty-fourth and West End, and he embraced her as a matter of course and kissed her with perfect self-confidence, as if he expected his kisses to be welcome. They were, but only in retrospect. She felt him notice her coldness and elect to ignore it. To make up, she put her arm around his waist, but resolved not to go back to his apartment with him. There she would be unable to think at all.

  “I wanted to call you last night, but we had to take down part of a tree. It was enormous, and we had to do it after the garden was pretty much cleared out. I didn’t get home until one. Your windows were so peacefully dark that I didn’t have the heart. Just wait until November, though. Nine to five, I swear, and lots of days off for exploring the countryside and finding specimens.”

  “Will that matter in November? November is a long way away.”

  “It will be life and death to you in November, my dear. Haven’t you noticed my fungal personality?”

  “You intend to grow on me?” Alice laughed in spite of her mood. “Disgusting.” But she resisted his pressure toward the silver and glass door of his apartment building. He noticed that, too, but only paused for the briefest second before continuing down the street toward the dusty green of the park.

  “And how was your week? I missed you. The irises are beginning to bloom.”

  “Did they remind you of me?”

  “Everything reminds me of you.”

  Now she stopped. Henry stopped, too, kindly, affectionately, adorably. Resolute, Alice said, “Can we not see each other for about a week?” but as she said it, desire overwhelmed her, and she could feel her pulse throbbing in her neck and temples. “Why do you have this effect on me?”

  “What effect is that?”

  “I won’t answer. I didn’t intend to say that.”

  He turned to face her and put his open hand under her hair, over her cheek and ear. “What effect?”

  “Someday you’re going to be intolerable, Henry. You lean on me, you push me around. I’m used to being alone. I like being alone, with lots of space around me. And I have a whole other life besides this one!”

  Henry’s hand dropped. Alice wondered if she looked as aghast as she felt. He turned away, saying, “I’ll call you later,” and stalked down the street. The renewal of Alice’s longing and desire was immediate and inevitable, like the resumption of music after a rest. She chased him and grabbed his elbow. “Henry, listen, I’m not going to talk, because I can’t predict what I’m going to say, but the effect is one of intense desire. Whenever I see you, I start dying to be with you.”

  “Have you had dinner?” His voice was carefully neutral, and the difference piqued Alice in spite of herself. “No, let’s!” she said, brightly, falsely. She could sense that the bulkheads separating the murder from Henry from her job from her parents were beginning to crack and leak, and in unexpected ways. She clutched Henry’s arm tightly. Why not tell him the whole story? Why not say, I have something to confide in you, Henry, or Listen to this! She did not have to begin with the perfect phrase, it would not be an artistic exercise. But even the remote possibility of speaking seemed to close her throat and stop her breathing. Henry was hurrying toward Broadway. She said, “Henry, I am falling in love with you. I always react badly when I’m falling in love.” This she had not meant to say, since it might not be true, and when he made the desired response, of unbending and taking her under his arm, of smiling warmly and kissing her on the hair, she was so irritated as to actively dislike him. Turning down Broadway, she burst into tears of frustration. Henry stood her on the corner and surveyed her, proprietary. “You’re a mess,” he said. “I’m going to Zabar’s to get some food. You stand right here. After that we’ll go back to my place and eat and take things one at a time, all right?” Here was her invitation. Alice nodded. Henry disappeared through the always promising doors of the delicatessen, and Alice stood among the umber-strollers and the passers-by, the future unreeling before her as palpably as the frames of a movie. Henry would lead somehow to Honey which would lead, of course, to the machinery of courts and laws. No decisions would seem to have been made—the two of them would talk about only possibilities and nuances, theories and likelihoods. It would be a relief. It was a relief already, just to think about it. Everybody slowed as they passed Zabar’s, if not to notice the bargains or the lady grinding out red pasta, then to ogle the slices of chocolate torte in the newly opened bakery. No one seemed to pay attention to the good weather any more, perhaps because it had changed imperceptibly from good to tedious. Alice bent down and wiped her eyes on the hem of her skirt, wishing she were the sort of person who always carried a handkerchief, or at least a wadded Kleenex. And approaching from the south was Susan, the smile of pleased recognition already fixed on her face. Inside the store, Alice thought that she could just make out Henry’s head at the end of a long line for the cashier. She hoped that the five people in front of him all had baskets full of little items. She raised her arm and waved to Susan.

  Susan kissed her. “Did you see Noah, then? I called you a couple of times this afternoon, but you were away from your desk.”

  “No, they wouldn’t let me. I talked to Honey, though.” She said it rather quickly.

  “What’s happening? They can’t just hold him there.”

  “He was arraigned this afternoon.” That’s what Rya had said, at any rate.

  “Is he getting out on bail? Does he have a lawyer? Does he know a lawyer?” Susan had settled herself in, and it became apparent to Alice that she thought they would go home together. Henry, thankfully, had made little progress in his line.


  “I didn’t ask that. And I can’t remember if Rya said her boss got him a lawyer, or offered. Maybe we should call him. What’s his last name?” “Don’t ask me. Levine? Loewy?”

  “What a bitch she is!” exclaimed Alice. Two people stood in front of Henry. He hoisted and shifted his basket. It was piled high. Fifty dollars’ worth of stuff, maybe.