by Jane Smiley
“It’s kind of nice.”
“Do you think so?” Susan dropped the paper and picked up her cake plate. After forking off two or three bits of the frosted square, she said, “It scares me. Once you’re out past the breakers, the sea may be very flat, but there’s no bottom. Even talking about it scares me. I want those seasons and Christmases and birthdays and school years to add up the way they did when we were kids.”
“I know what you mean, but I still prefer the serenity.”
Susan sighed, picked up the paper, threw it down again. “I guess I don’t know what to think, actually, since the thing about Craig that drove me most to insane fury was the constant springing of his adolescent hopes, He always thought it was going to add up sooner or later. It makes me mad to think about it. I was the one who was always telling him to grow up. And telling Denny, too, I’m sorry to say.”
Alice waited expectantly, but Susan did not go on. Alice looked over her shoulder. She was reading an article about videodisc recorders as they compared to videotape recorders. Alice smiled. Susan’s television, a twelve-inch black and white with a broken aerial, was so infrequently used that they were always surprised when they turned it on and it actually worked. She picked up the magazine section, which she opened first to food, then to fashion, then to the double-crostic. Susan said, “Do you think I loved Denny?”
“What?”
“Did it seem to you that I loved Denny? Did we look like people who were in love?”
“Yes. You were in love.”
“I don’t know that. I can’t remember. On the one hand, I loved to sleep with him. I loved everything about it from talking to him in bed to making love and sleeping next to him. He was very good in bed, from the beginning to the end. I mean, aside from knowing what to do, he was perfectly desirous, and his desire expressed itself in an attractive, natural way. I’ve been trying to say to myself just how he was, but there aren’t any expressions that give the flavor of it. He was self-confident, and passionate, and pleased with my body. I also liked being with him, when we were alone, and sometimes when Craig was around. For a long time I thought that if we could just get this problem of his professional life solved, then everything would be fine. It was a problem, in a box, manageable. Later on, I saw it differently, but at first it was just an addendum, detachable from the general perfection. But right alongside my love for him and my sense of permanence and my complete inability to look at or desire other men was this utter conviction that it just couldn’t go on. The conviction was instinctual and irrational, so I didn’t pay much attention to it, or tried not to, but it was there from the beginning, like a Siamese twin to my love for him. I think I toyed with the idea of walking out the door every day for twelve years. We would argue about buying milk and I would say to myself, This is intolerable, it can’t be borne, I’m packing my bag, but at the same time I would be planning his favorite dinner, or buying him some little present to make up. I don’t see how I could have entertained two mutually exclusive certainties at the same time.”
“Ambivalence—”
“Do you think that’s what it was? Just a kind of inherent ambivalence, stuck to me but not to us?”
“Did you ever tell him about it?”
“I don’t think that’s something you tell men. Would you have told Jim?”
“Believe me, it would have been a relief to both of us if I’d ever had a moment of ambivalence.”
“You are terribly absolute.” She said it as if it really were terrible.
Trying not to be sensitive, Alice laughed. “I think of myself as the ultimate waffler.”
“Never! Never! You don’t know how frightening you are sometimes.”
“Then the ultimate wimp. You may be right about my absoluteness, but maybe I’m really absolutely prostrate, resolutely prostrate, militantly prostrate.”
“You’re thinking of Jim, but I don’t think you really were like that.”
Alice said, “You know, I really love you. I love our friendship. I can’t imagine what I would do without you.”
Susan smiled, but her face instantly filmed over and it seemed to Alice that her skin would be cold to the touch. After a moment, she said, “But did you think Denny and I were in love?”
“Yes, I did. I was so sure of it that I never thought about it.”
“I wish I had a videotape of everything, twelve years long, unedited, or at least a tape recording. If I could stand back and look at us together, I might know what was going on.”
“I should have been a better eyewitness.” Thinking of Henry, she added, “How do people learn to notice things?”
“Well, you did have your own life to live, you know.”
“But I feel like the view is always partially blocked, or even completely blocked, by a mirror.”
“And I feel like the view is always partially blurred by a mist of resentment.”
“It would be lovely to see clearly, wouldn’t it? To know something for sure, just once.”
“Would it?” Susan picked up the News of the Week in Review and settled back onto the sofa. Alice got up to make popcorn.
Alice had left before eleven, still unwilling to actually sleep in that apartment, and was now sitting naked and freshly bathed in her dark kitchen, drinking a glass of milk. In a detached but interested way, as if scientifically, she was considering the fact of the murder, and Susan’s identity as the murderer. It hardly moved her at all any more. She had thought Thursday night that the surprise would never leave her, that without wishing to she would never look at Susan and not sense those two corpses in close proximity. But she had apparently overestimated her capacity for moral outrage. Homicidal drunk drivers and cheating landlords that she saw on the news outraged her more. Everything about her upbringing and education had prepared her for a grand repudiation of this wrong: Susan had taken two lives, and two lives that Alice was close to and cared about. Nonetheless, Alice knew that her adoration of her friend, and her anticipation of lasting, comfortable intimacy were greater than ever. The evening before, she could have sent Susan back to Chops and gone off with Henry, but she had not. Although monumentally confused just at the moment, she had not acted confused at all. Part of her had wanted to be polite and careful and conventional, but the rest of her had simply acted. Alice smiled.
IN HENRY’S apartment, the lights went on, one, two three. He did not appear, but the knowledge that he was there filled her with such sudden longing and desire that her throat contracted. She sat silent in the kitchen, watching, staring after him, but he didn’t appear, not even the top of his bushy head. He obviously had no interest in her apartment. After a few minutes, his lights went out, one, two, three. Alice wanted to cry.
The intensity of her feeling surprised her, abolishing all her thoughts of only a minute before. The evening with Susan and her nagging worries about Ray faded to insignificance beside the fact that Henry had not even glanced out his window at her, had not even checked to see if her windows were dark. For a moment, she thought that she dared not go over to see him. It was nearly twelve, he would already be in bed, but even as she thought it, she was struggling with her jeans and looking for a casual but attractive shirt. Keys? Keys? Keys were on the dining-room table. Did she need anything else? She ran back to her bedroom for flip-flops, and in a few moments was on the street.
It was another fragrant night, but warmer, the twenty-third of May. Sometime in the previous week, in the round of identical, ideal days, the boundary of summer had been crossed. Summer in New York. It was almost threatening. But the breeze off the river, though warm, was dry and refreshing, evocative not of flowers but of truck gardens—tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers. Her fingers found the button beside the name “H. Mullet,” and pressed.
Henry was wearing his terrycloth robe, tightly and modestly tied around the waist. He did not step from the door when she got off the elevator, nor did he greet her. The elevator doors closed behind her, and in the silence between them there fell only t
he sound of whirring gears and clacking cables. It occurred to her for the first time that he might have someone in the apartment with him. That issue they had not had time to clarify. If an innocent curious voice were to call out “Henry?” she could—
“What’s up?” said Henry. Serious and closed, his face was not as handsome as she remembered, not young, the sort of face that had belonged to the fathers of her friends when she was a child, would belong to Henry in Brooklyn, when he was a father of little girls. She said, “I saw your lights go on and off. I wanted to see you.”
He waited for her to go on, his determination not to help her, and his anger, apparent.
Unable to help herself, she said, “You angry at me?” and her own voice sounded annoyed, although she didn’t think she was annoyed in the least.
Henry bristled, pulling his belt tighter with a jerk, and then saying, “Irritated, but not for long.”
“What do you mean by that?” Aghast, Alice sensed the hardness of her tone, but it seemed to float away from her, out of reach. Her hand, that should have gone over her mouth, thrust aggressively into the pocket of her jeans.
Henry said, “I don’t understand you. You give me the run around in the street yesterday, then call me up in the middle of dinner just to turn me down for the evening, and then you stomp over here at midnight, and glare at me. This I do not understand.”
“I’m not glaring at you!”
“You’re glaring at me.”
“Don’t tell me what I am doing!” Finally she closed her mouth with a snap, tight over her uncontrollable tongue. If she was lucky, Henry would take a deep breath and start them over again, invite her into his welcoming apartment, elicit the cause of her temper. Yes, he looked old, but wonderful. Warm and solid and insulted. A hank of hair on the crown of his head was standing straight up, blond whiskers glinted over his chin and cheeks. It was possible that she did love him.
He did not smile or step back, which would have been invitation enough. The slightest, most casual question would do for an opening, but his lips were closed. She said, “I know what I’m doing! I’m not glaring at you!” words that were somehow tied to their conversation, but not to her thoughts. Henry’s face grew perceptibly more distant. She saw in the change how receptive he had been only a moment before, how trivially conciliatory the proper words might have been when she stepped off the elevator. He had gone from being annoyed with her to thinking she was boorish. He retreated a step. Appalled, Alice remained motionless, the glare, for that’s what it was, she admitted, still plastered across her face. Hardworking, passionate about his profession, interesting to be with, solid, wonderful in bed. The door closed in her face, and she heard his bare feet retreat down the short hallway, the bedsprings creak. She turned and poked the elevator button, thinking of Susan, then waited quite a time, staring at her face in the wavy glass, reflected off the empty darkness of the elevator shaft.
13
IN THE morning Ray told them through wired jaws that he was selling his co-op and going back to Minnesota. His father was considering going into the solar energy business. Ray was interested in that. He winced when he talked, and they sat to his left. “I’ve been thinking about it for a month,” he said. “This has made up my mind.”
Susan had come reluctantly, and Alice could see that Ray’s injuries did little to soften her resentment. She responded to his announcement with a laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“Are you going to marry some nice girl and settle down? Come on.”
“It’s unlikely but not impossible.”
“Won’t you miss the old gang?”
“I’ll miss Noah and Alice.”
“Not our old gang.”
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it.”
“The passion, the danger—”
He spoke carefully. “I don’t know what I’ll miss. I don’t know anything. I’ve got to try something else. Don’t you know that all of us have reached the point where every choice is a compromise? That would be better than this. Anyway, it’s none of your business.”
“Ray,” said Alice. “Do you need some magazines?”
Ray shrugged. Alice leaned toward Susan and took her hand. “There’s a newsstand downstairs.” She lifted her eyebrows. Susan scowled, but then nodded. Ray said, “There’s money in the drawer.” Susan went out without taking it. Before the door swished closed, they listened to the click of her heels in the corridor, then there was silence. Ray squirmed painfully in his bed and then winced. Alice said, “I shouldn’t have brought her. I’m sorry.”
Ray lifted his hand and dropped it.
“Is there anything you need from outside for the next few days? I can come back this evening, maybe.”
Ray lifted his hand again, dropped it again, and then, after a moment, turned on the television, checked two or three channels, and turned it off. At last he said, “Alice, I feel very badly that I got you mixed up in this. Especially after you said—”
“Better my doorstep than a stranger’s.”
“For my sake, yeah.”
“It’s okay, I’m just glad—”
“It isn’t okay.”
He was about to say something awful or frightening. Alice sighed. Sure enough, he said, “My former friend Jeff duplicated the keys to your apartment. He gave them to me, but I’m not so sure that he didn’t make some for himself.”
“Why should he? I don’t have anything of value.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything. A person shouldn’t have keys out, that’s all.”
“I can have the locks changed.”
“You could.”
“I was going to anyway.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. Spooked, I guess. This stuff has spooked me. Last week I thought someone was following me in the stacks, and then later I thought I saw—uh—traces that someone had been in my apartment one night when I was out.”
“Which night?”
“I don’t know. Some night. Wednesday, I guess.”
“What kind of traces?”
“Nothing. Some shoes that I thought were one place were another. Stuff like that. It was stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t. That was me. I was in your apartment Wednesday night. I let myself in with the duplicate keys.”
“What for?”
“I wanted to borrow something, but you had it with you.”
“What did you want to borrow, Ray?”
“I didn’t borrow it and I didn’t hurt anything, and Jeff stayed outside, so let’s just forget it, all right?”
“I don’t want to forget it! What did you want that you couldn’t ask me for?”
With his good hand Ray pushed the sheet down and then pulled it up again. Alice exclaimed, “Don’t be so mysterious! If there’s something going on, and in my apartment, I deserve to know what it is!”
“I wanted your keys to Susan’s apartment. Remember she made the rest of us give ours back suddenly, and there was no way I could avoid it.”
“Why did you want the keys to Susan’s apartment?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I wanted to go over there while she was at work one day and look for something.”
“The cocaine?”
“Well—” Ray nodded. “I had to just make sure that the police had it. Looking for myself was the only way.”
“But I had my keys with me, so you didn’t get to look, and somehow that’s related to your getting beaten up, isn’t it?”
“A couple of guys want either their drugs or their money.”
“Ray, how could you get into this?”
“Actually, it seemed like a good deal at the time. Everybody felt very lucky.” His lips spread in a clenched-teeth grimace.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I should make plenty from selling the co-op. I bought it four years ago, and the couple below me know someone who’s already interested.”
�
�Are they going to wait that long? The people who want their money?”
“Someone they know is a realtor.”
“Oh.”
The door opened and Susan came in. She was carrying an Esquire, a Gentlemen’s Quarterly and a People. She set them down on the nightstand. She was breathing heavily. “Ray—,” she began.
“Well,” said Alice, standing up. “We had probably better be going!”
“Sit down,” said Susan. “I’m going to say what I have to say anyway.” Ray looked at her fearfully. The tirade had obviously been readied and polished while she was going for the magazines. Ray turned his head, winced, and slowly turned it back to where it had been before. “I—,” Susan began. “Oh, screw it!” She grabbed her purse and clattered out of the room.
When Alice caught up with her, she said, “Is there any good place to eat near here?” and Alice felt reprieved.
She ordered wine with her shrimp salad, and when it came, golden and dewy, she was moved by the esthetic perfection of her green meal on the beige tablecloth. Once she had begun, though, she realized her mistake, for everything was warring. The effects did not take place in her stomach; there was no nausea or pain. In her bloodstream and her head, though, there was a series of alternating sensations—elation and exhaustion—that made her hands tremble and her lips twitch while she ate. She was starving. She couldn’t not eat. Susan said, “Are you all right?”
“It’s been a bizarre weekend.”
“To say the least.”
“I’m glad you didn’t berate Ray. You have every right to be—”
“Madame had to wait on a customer herself yesterday. She was positively shocked. This slender gray-haired woman who practically swam in the sixes came out of her dressing room and handed Madame a pile of things and told her to go look for smaller sizes, and while Madame was marshalling her English to say no without losing a sale, the woman went back into her dressing room and handed out another set that she didn’t want and said that Madame needn’t bother with those, they were hideous, and would she please—”