by Jane Smiley
“I think we ought to call her up and make her come back.”
“Would it be worth it? She’d be around all the time.”
“Even so—”
Henry moved closer to the counter. “Listen,” said Alice, taking Susan’s arm and turning her away from Zabar’s. “There’s more. This is too crowded. Walk down the street with me.” She glanced back; Henry was at the counter, arm raised to point out rolls and croissants. She sighed. In a moment he would be out on the street, looking for her. She propelled Susan down Eighty-first Street. “What?” said Susan. “What? I have to work tonight. I was going to go in and get some cheese.”
“No, listen. We’ll come back. Just walk around the block with me, I have something to tell you.” She looked behind. No Henry, indignant, out of love, followed them. She said, “It’s solved. He did it. He confessed and Honey’s convinced.”
“You’re kidding.”
Alice peered into Susan’s face, trying to detect the exact degree of surprise and elation there. The other woman was impassive. Alice pressed her. “I’m not kidding. And Honey says he has direct evidence.”
“I can’t believe it.”
Really? thought Alice. But disbelief was a condition Susan often expressed. “Me, neither, actually,” she said.
“But then why would he confess?”
Alice coughed, pretending to think of Noah, but really preparing herself to lie again. Finally she said, “Maybe he’s just trying it out. Maybe he thinks it’s a way out of something. But maybe he did do it. He could have.”
“He could have stood up to Craig?” Susan smiled.
“Everyone has depths, don’t you think? On the face of it, yes, it seems unlikely, but who can say?”
“He never stood up to Craig. In twelve years of playing music, he just took orders, even when they were contradictory, wrong, spiteful, or stupid. He never even argued.”
Alice forced conviction into her voice. “It could accumulate. Honey thinks he did it, anyway.”
“He’s convinced?”
In vain Alice looked for something telling in Susan’s face, listened for something revealing in her voice. There was no relief, no budding gladness. “What are we going to do?”
“What do you mean?” answered Susan. “It looks to me like we’re done doing.”
They had turned the corner of Eighty-second Street, and were walking back toward Broadway. Alice walked without speaking, listening to the confident rhythm of Susan’s clogs on the pavement, back to Broadway and then toward Zabar’s again. “Wait here,” said Susan. “Then you can walk me back to work. Want anything?” Alice shook her head. Henry was long gone, or maybe only briefly gone, but a miss was as insulting as a mile, wasn’t it?
She looked down at her shoes, Top-Siders, the lace knotted where it had broken, and even as she looked she seemed to grow distant from them. She lifted her eyes and fixed them on the Zabar’s window, and then she turned her head and looked across the street. Everything had grown smaller, more distinct, and Alice marvelled that she wasn’t afraid, only wildly, violently annoyed. A man bumped her, nicely dressed, preciously dressed in tight jeans and the sort of imported cotton shirt that Susan sold. Alice wanted to destroy him. She watched him step into Eighty-first Street and disappear into the crowd and wanted to shout, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you excuse yourself? You bumped me! You slob!” Her anger seemed to lift her off the ground. She closed her eyes and put her hands on her head. She was perspiring at the hair-line and breathing hard. She wondered why anger didn’t break people, split them open like figs, explode them. At her elbow, Susan said, “You look awful. Why don’t you open this and have some.” Into Alice’s grasp she put a large cold bottle, sparkling cider. Alice touched the bottle to her forehead. Everything resumed its normal size. “Are you hot?” she said. “I think this weather is awful. Maybe I’m coming down with something.” She closed her eyes and took another deep breath while Susan struggled with the cap to the cider. “I’m sure I’m sick. It must be the flu. We’ve been leading such a strange life. It would obviously make you more susceptible to things.” Susan handed her the bottle and she put it to her lips. The sharpness of the carbonation was startling, delicious and repellent at the same time. A sense of panic that had ignited within her was quenched for a moment. She wiped her mouth after a long drink and handed the bottle back to Susan. Susan. Susan held out a piece of Brie cheese to her, then a large ripe strawberry. Susan who was familiar, kind, competent, habitually loved. Alice ate the strawberry, then another hunk of cheese, this one balanced on a cracker. “Feel better?” said Susan.
“Much.”
“Come back to the shop with me. It’s nice and cool, and everything is new. Sometimes I think that’s the only good thing about the shop, that nothing belongs to anyone.”
11
THE three salesgirls at Chops all had something of Susan’s air of peace. Like her, they were attractive, but not in the usual fashion. Jane, although slender, had broad shoulders and wide hips. Karen was short and round, Louie had the wide-apart eyes and oddly shaped teeth of someone from the West Virginia mining country. And yet they were all superbly dressed and graceful, as if the shop owners hoped to prove to prospective customers that anyone could be transformed by Chops clothing into the ideal New Yorker. The girls were enormously polite, not only to customers, but also to Alice, Susan, and each other. Their personal lives were unimaginable, and Chops, with its white walls, dark woodwork, and neutral carpeting that flowed up steps, into dressing rooms, and over the various levels of the window display area, seemed to exist apart from personal lives. Customers entered smiling, already casting their eyes at the clothing displays. They gave out little noises of pleasure at the freshness of the air, and they seemed to relax visibly into the renewal of possibility that Chops presented. The mirrors were along the south wall, silvering the air. It worked on her, too. She was no longer ill or even afraid. She lounged in a chair behind the sales counter and watched the customers wander in, try on clothes, and wander out. People were watched, but left alone for their vanity to flower in peace.
Susan, the author of this orderly world, was her best self. She arranged clothes on hangers, folded and piled sweaters so that red, blue, green, and yellow glittered off one another and drew the eye to that expensive corner of the store. She complimented customers on their choices, but only if they had shown some taste, thanked Jane and Karen for taking care of difficult customers, and apologized instantly for a suspected overcharge, thanking the customer for coming back and telling them about it. She vacuumed; she looked at the books; she showed Alice new designs that she thought Alice might like or might marvel at the expense of.
To someone like this, Alice thought, a life like Craig’s would of course become unbearable. Susan glanced over at her and Alice made an ostentatious sigh of relief. Susan smiled. And if you were involuntarily attached to that life, the fear of being sucked into it would be constant, wouldn’t it? An action to close off that possibility was at least understandable. And now they were saved. Noah, after all, was a mess. Even if he didn’t get off (and innocent, how could he not get off?), prison might be good for him. He could remake his life there. Get out for good behavior before he was forty-five. Forty-five was hardly middle-aged any more. But he would be acquitted, Alice was sure of that. And that would be the end. There were new murders every day. Once Honey had brought in his suspect, he would have other things to do.
It was only momentum that kept Alice’s gears of thought and analysis grinding past any practical application. The mystery was over, and everyone, as befitted life in New York City in 1980, could have what he wanted. She looked across the room. What she wanted was to have her life arranged by Susan for months and years to come. The fears she had had of Susan earlier in the week, the glimpse she had seemed to see of Susan in her apartment, were her knowledge of the murder rising to the surface, and adjustment to the facts, while curiously physical, hadn’t been especially hard. Sus
an disappeared into the back of the store and reappeared carrying a large carton. When she opened it, white blouses spilled forth, gauze, lace, luxury. The odor of cotton wafted in Alice’s direction. When Susan began to pick them up and button them onto hangers, Alice stood up and went over to her.
ALICE stuck her card into the Citibank money machine and was informed that she could withdraw a hundred dollars or less. She took a hundred. Behind her, Susan was gazing downtown. Alice smiled, and stuck the money in her purse. “Now,” she said, “let’s go to your place and change clothes.”
“What for? It’s after nine.”
“You’ll see. Leave it to me.” Susan walked along with complete docility, her clogs tapping the pavement. Alice took her hand off the other woman’s elbow and put it around her waist. “I’m starving,” she said. “I’ll take you out to dinner. I’m tired of living my life as if I were a librarian.” The inside of her mouth ached with hunger.
After calling Gallagher’s and making sure that Susan was in the shower, Alice dialed Henry. For once he answered. She let his open, alluring tones ring in her ear for a moment before speaking, since she knew that the sound of her voice would close them up. “Hi!” she exclaimed.
“Oh,” said Henry.
“You think I abandoned you, don’t you?”
“You might say that.”
Alice took a deep breath. “I got sick, or rather, I knew I was about to get sick, and I had to find a restaurant to throw up in. When I came back you were gone.”
“Are you all right now?”
“Well, actually, when I got there, I didn’t throw up after all. Why didn’t you wait for a minute?”
“I did.”
“Henry—”
“Do you want to come over?”
“I do, but I can’t. I’m at a girlfriend’s place, and we’ve got to go out.”
“Fine, I’ll call you.”
“Henry—”
“I have to get off.”
“I’m thinking of you.”
“Fine.” He hung up. The shower was no longer running. Alice put the phone on the hook. “Who was that?” said Susan, suddenly behind her.
“I called Gallagher’s,” answered Alice. “I made a reservation.”
Susan grinned. “Funny kind of reservation.” Alice grinned back at her.
There wasn’t much to say, really. Their cab ride, the seats they took, their preliminary exchanges with the waitress about drinks and dinner, all these were like companionable silence. Alice’s spirits rose fearsomely, or were turned up, like the volume on a television set. This is it, Alice thought, bouncing a little in her chair. The sensation of having moved into a new relationship with Susan had grown vigorously since the afternoon and now was so bulky that it crowded out their customary conversational ease. Leaving Henry at Zabar’s, probing Susan so unsuccessfully that her convictions were somehow confirmed, spending the evening at Chops, sitting here, every moment carried the quality of arrested importance, so that the mechanism by which they had given way to one another was incomprehensible. This vividness confirmed her suspicion that this was it, while her knowledge that this was it enhanced the color of every moment, including the present one. Susan said, “My father always thought that the only good dinner was a steak dinner. Medium steak with salt and pepper, baked potato with butter and salt and pepper, three leaves of lettuce and a wedge of tomato with oil and vinegar and salt and pepper.” She chuckled.
“The cuisine of the Midwest,” said Alice. They could talk about food forever. “There were some Chinese dignitaries that visited Rochester last summer and my mother sent me the menu of the dinner they gave. Roast beef, ham, broccoli, potatoes au gratin, corn on the cob, salad, homemade ice cream and chocolate cake. They must have spent days in the bathroom.”
“Here it is.” Before them were set warm oval plates of dark, fragrant steak. The meat to be eaten, simple, familiar, savory, filled Alice with a sense of abundance. She pressed it with her fork and juice spurted. Susan took a bite. “It is delicious,” she said. It was. Alice ordered a bottle of wine and poured two glasses full to the top. Susan smiled slightly. Because, perhaps, of the money, or the meat, or the wine, Alice felt pleasingly unlike herself, less constricted and taller, able to survey the room, judge the meal, make demands of the waitress. Susan, in her crisp white dress, her hair smoothed back by a toothed band, seemed a pristine treasure. That their fondness, or even love, was mutual, seemed astonishing. There are men, Alice thought, who never get over the luck of their wives, the luck of having such women in their arms or their rooms. Alice could never be that kind of woman, but Susan was. Denny must surely have felt that way about her. Susan said, “When I was in grammar school, there was a family down the street. I didn’t like their little girl much, but the mother served the best cakes. They were always colored the most extraordinary colors—orange with blue icing, pink with green icing. One kid was allowed to color the cake batter, the second kid could do the icing, the third could decorate, and they were always covered with things like cut-up gum drops or had red hots in the batter or something. I couldn’t believe the way my mother always stuck to chocolate cake with chocolate icing or white cake with white icing.”
“Susan—”
“Hmm?” It was a polite sound, as if from a distance, telling Alice not to broach anything important.
Alice acquiesced, and said something about the pink and white checkerboard cakes her grandmother had made for her birthdays, but her fresh understanding of Susan and her fresh feeling for her pressed to come out. Successfully, for once, perceptively for once, and quickly, for perhaps the first time ever, she had put together the gist of their talk since the murders. And this in spite of her roller coaster sweep of emotions and her usual fears of doing and thinking the wrong thing. She glanced at Susan and realized that the knowledge itself left her strangely unrepelled, as one was unrepelled by the deaths in Hamlet or Macbeth. Craig seemed, in retrospect, to have been as much the agent of his end, and Denny’s, as Susan was. Hadn’t his every risk with drugs or motorcycles or money always seemed invited, his every escape the effect of luck or the kindness of others? And Denny, as perceptive as any of them about Craig’s proclivities, had never stepped back once, had never even tried to untie the knot that bound them so closely. Having the knowledge, however, was somehow exhilarating, although perhaps Susan wouldn’t see it that way. They cut, speared and ate. Alice drained her wine glass and filled it again. She filled Susan’s again. Susan stirred sour cream and butter into her baked potato, then closed it together to preserve the heat. She said, “All these memories of my childhood have been booming over me lately. I don’t think I know how to be an adult without Denny.”
“I felt a little that way after Jim, and I was nearly twenty-one when I met him.”
“I think a lot about my grandparents’ farm. There was a pump handle by the sink. How can I be old enough for that? I spent the summer there with Sarah when my mother had rheumatic fever. We spent the whole time wading in the drainage ditches. When I couldn’t get to sleep last night, I tried counting the number of things each of my grandparents would have touched in the course of a single day. Everything they talked about had weight: how much the pigs were gaining, how many pounds of milk the cows were giving, how many tons of seed or feed they would need or had used. When the weather was bad, my grandmother would always say that the air was so heavy you couldn’t lift it with a pitchfork. And she was heavy. You could always hear her upstairs, and follow her progress from room to room. And she always sighed when she had to climb the stairs, or even get out of a deep chair. My grandfather was thin, but his tools were heavy, his clothes were heavy, his boots were heavy. It sounds unpleasant, I suppose, but it was very physical and substantial. If something weighed a lot, it had value.” Susan pressed open her baked potato.
A man came in who looked from the back like Henry, but wasn’t Henry. Alice’s heart jumped, but only once, and only, she thought, because the prospect of Henry and S
usan meeting struck her so bizarrely. She hadn’t thought about Henry all evening, and now, when she did, the usual sexual vibration, as of a bell struck, was absent, subsumed in her present enthusiasm for Susan. There was not the energy for both, she thought. As she sat there, Henry began to seem fantastic; that she had slept with him, eaten with him, wanted to confide in him seemed aberrant and mindless behavior. Her passion for him, which she remembered now as a fact, not as a feeling, was rather embarrassing, not herself, a bolt from the blue. She squirmed in her chair. Looking at Susan reassured her, but at the same time reminded her of the danger their friendship was in. The circumstances themselves put it in danger, in spite of Honey’s incompetence and the evidence, whatever it was, against Noah. And Susan herself might inadvertently expose something. Alice said, “Have you thought any more about leaving your apartment? Or even leaving the city? Maybe we should move on. We’ve been here six years, and God knows, I’m firmly wedged into the L-Two trap. I would love to find something at a university library, and with your taste and experience, you would obviously be snapped up by a department store in the hinterlands. We aren’t unemployable any more, you know, or even beginners.” Susan did not look receptive, but Alice went on, “We’re being exploited now. We could make more and live for less almost anywhere else.”
“I hadn’t thought about moving.”
“You don’t have to live at the scene of the crime!”
“I’d rather drop the subject.”
“Of course.” Her second glass of wine nearly finished, Alice drained it and ordered another bottle.
“Are you hoping to get me drunk? Talking me into living with you without benefit of clergy?”
“Is that the way to do it? Anyway, I’m hoping to get me drunk.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.” Alice smiled. “Like I said, I’m tired of living in that pale librarianly way. I have no debts, I eat plenty of fruit, I come home every night and read. A big day for me is seeing old leftist movies at the Bleecker Street Cinema. I’ve never dissipated anything, even a free afternoon. This is New York: It’s time I did something that was costly. I’m tired of going to all the cheap things and counting every nickel. I’m tired of worrying about the abyss, you know? Yes, you have to be careful in order to live by yourself in Manhattan on seventeen thousand a year, but I’ve been careful careful careful. Nobody else has. Now I’m not going to be careful for a while.”