by Jane Smiley
Alice went into the kitchen, tore off the sheet of paper, and said, “It’s in here.”
Dorfmann dialed. “Hey, Gene. Where’s that asshole Bosworth. He’s got my needlenose. Well, see if you can find him on the radio. Yeah, I’ll wait. Keep trying. Yeah, I got this chick’s door all torn apart.” While he was waiting, Alice stood in the doorway and closed her eyes. She knew with perfect conviction that Bosworth would never be found. After a long time, during which Don Dorfmann fidgeted and cursed, he exclaimed, “What the fuck’s he out by Coney Island for? They got locksmiths out there. Shit. Two whole new doors, huh? Well, what am I going to do for needlenose? Nah, that place is closed. Yeah, there’s that supply place in Long Island City. Anybody around over there? Well, who’s closest? I’m on the Upper West Side. Yorkville? I could get there. Okay, thanks, Gene, and if that asshole calls in, you tell him I’m going to have his butt in a sling.” He hung up and turned to Alice, who was already nodding in resignation. “Back in an hour, at the most, if I can get this guy across the park. If not, there’s a tool supply place over in Queens. Meantime, you got no problems. You’re no worse off than you were before. God, that fucker!” He tucked in his shirts. “Look lady, I’ll even leave my tools here. You got nothing to worry about.” Alice was still nodding. Finally, she said, “Well, it’s been that kind of weekend all around.”
“Me, too,” said Don Dorfmann, and then he was gone. Alice picked up the phone and called Henry. His windows were dark, so she hadn’t much hope. Susan, apparently, was out, too. She entertained the suspicion that they were out together, just as, in junior high, when she called two friends and both their lines were busy, she had entertained the suspicion that they were talking to each other, about her. She sighed. It was after eight and she hadn’t eaten yet. Thinking of food made her think of her lunch with Susan. Then she entertained the suspicion that Susan had jumped, after all, and the temptation to call the Twentieth Precinct and find out. But anything like that would come to her immediately from Honey. She shook her head violently, cried “Ack!” in a loud, harsh voice, and went into the kitchen, where she smoothed the piece of paper with Dorfmann’s name on it and slipped it half under the phone. After that, she entertained a picture of Honey finding it and being posthumously proud of her.
14
AFTER eating Alice could think more clearly, and she felt almost sanguine about the future. Actually, events had worked themselves out remarkably well. Ray had suffered the most, but he had also risked the most, and now he had been jerked roughly back to normality. She hadn’t seen him so serene in years as she had seen him that morning, a man who had learned his lesson and knew it. In addition, his beating would surely throw enough doubt on the evidence against Noah that his release, somehow, would be insured, and how could he fail to have been shaken up by his experience, how could he fail to start a new life or even a new marriage, with someone brighter and more sensitive than Rya? That Susan should finally react appropriately to what she had done was good, unequivocally good, sufficient punishment, in Alice’s view. If she could preserve Susan long enough, Susan would understand that. Ray’s beating would cover her, too, lead Honey’s suspicions toward the Westside Highway, where perpetrators vanished, or turned up with any number of sins to account for. For them, Alice had no sympathy. Denny and Craig? They glimmered in the distance. It was odd, she thought, how readily people cut their losses. The shock and horror she had felt that first weekend at the deaths of her friends and the shattering of her group could not be recovered. This, she thought, was how avalanche victims felt, who gladly left fingers and feet in the snow as a payment for their lives. It was how she herself had felt when Jim agreed to come back and try again—no, he didn’t love her as she’d thought he had, but he wanted to come back, that was enough, that was wonderful. In the end, you were pragmatic, weren’t you, and the relief and joy of attaining your compromise goals were as delirious as if you had gotten everything.
By the time she had washed her dishes and swept the kitchen floor, it was nine-thirty, and she was thinking about bed. To despair of the locksmith, she thought, would be to suggest that, tools or no, she had ever expected his return. If there was one thing she had learned about New York in her six years there, it was that you couldn’t simply run an errand, meet someone, drop over to the hardware store. Tomorrow he would get the pliers, at nine or ten, no matter how much he wanted to get them before then. And how was it that she, only daughter of a tool addict, was expecting a microwave in the mails and not a full set of everything her father carried?
She flopped down on the couch with an old Newsweek, giving him another hour. At ten the phone rang. “Hey, man, I can’t put anything together for a couple of hours yet. I can give you one of two choices. I can send another twenty-four-hour guy over there sometime tonight, when he finishes the job he’s working on, or I can come myself around midnight.”
“Then how long would it take you to do the work?”
“Hour, maybe.”
That was one o’clock. Adding another three hours to compensate for his optimism, that had Alice in bed by four. The very thought made her yawn. “Look,” she said. “It doesn’t seem so important to me now. I mean, I don’t even know for sure that this person has my key. If I start to worry, I’ll go stay somewhere else. But what about your tools?”
“Fuck ’em, man. I’ve had it. I haven’t taken a night off in three months. You keep ’em, and I’ll be there by seven-thirty, eight for sure.”
“I’ll be up.”
“Look, lady, you can call another locksmith, if you’re worried, but the boss said he’d give you twenty-five percent off for your patience.”
“I’m not worried. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And she wasn’t. She marched right into the bathroom and took a shower without once, she realized afterward, thinking of the shower scene in Psycho, then she got out, dried herself vigorously with her largest blue towel, put on a T-shirt and underpants, and called up Susan, who answered with perfect calm and no suicidal intent in her voice that Alice could detect. She said, “I want to ask you a question.”
“Anything.”
“Does what you told me today mean that I can worry about you and check up on you?”
“I don’t know. Try it and see what happens.”
“What are you doing this evening?”
“Watching television and writing letters.”
“What kind of letters?”
“Business correspondence to clothing wholesalers.”
“Sounds innocent enough. Can I come over?”
“It’s nearly eleven. You don’t need to worry about me.” Her tone was extremely firm.
“It’s not—”
“I don’t think I would do it tonight.” Her voice rose a little, but she suppressed it. Alice could tell that her concern was already tiresome to the other woman, and she could not bring herself to press any further. Whatever she might say now about fears for her own safety would sound made up. “Okay.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Well, I won’t apologize.”
“All of this will be over soon.”
“I hope so.”
Down on Eighty-fourth Street, a cab pulled up in front of her building, but then Henry’s building, too. A woman got out, slender, well dressed in the sort of purple silk dress that Alice never could find but always wished she had. The man behind her, who waited a second to pay the cabby and receive his change, was Henry. The woman, who was nicely made up, with dark lipstick and a daring, fashionable hairdo, smiled confidently at him. Henry’s reaction was not visible, but going up the step to his door, he took her arm at the elbow, so firmly that Alice could feel it herself. Suddenly exhausted, she finished her milk and put the glass in the sink. Then, though she had planned to look at the news for a moment, she went straight to bed, detouring only to put up the chain. But the chain was on the floor. Alice looked at it for a long moment, perplexe
d, then kicked it angrily down the hallway, exclaiming, “Well, it never did me any good, anyway!”
ALICE didn’t know where she was. In the first place, the bed was angled oddly to the window. That should have been to the right, opposite the bed’s foot, but it was to the left and behind her. And the bed seemed to point in the wrong direction. Alice had the sensation for a moment of being on a train that was beginning to move backward. She shook her head and came more fully awake, then remembered that she was sleeping in her second bedroom, because the sheets in her bedroom were dirty and she had been too lazy and depressed to change them. Alice sighed and turned over on her stomach, arranging the sheet over her back and holding her eyes tightly closed. So that she would not think of anything that might keep her awake (Henry, Susan), she made herself think the words, Go back to sleep, in a monotonous chant. Just then a sound from the outer rooms of the apartment wakened her completely. She turned her head so that one ear was free of the pillow, and held her breath. The sound, a very small one, came again. It was a familiar sound, or at least, a fragment of a familiar sound, but Alice could not place it. After hearing it the second time, she did not hear it again. In a few minutes, she began to doubt that she had heard it at all. She took a deep breath and settled herself once more for sleep. The twin bed in the second bedroom was very comfortable, firm and without lumps. She liked the sheets she had for it, too, old and all cotton, slick and limp even after washing. Doreen had given her the comforter from her childhood bed. It was light but warm, perfect for Alice, who slept cold even in the middle of summer, but also sometimes broke into a sweat in winter and had to throw off her gown in the middle of the night. The sound came again, quickly, a hair louder. Alice, nearly asleep, was inclined to dismiss it. If it was so familiar, she had obviously heard it hundreds of times before, and it was undoubtedly some sound of the apartment building. She stretched herself into a comfortable X and pushed her nose into the pillow, thinking, Go back to sleep, go back to sleep. Everything was quiet. Even the sirens on Broadway sounded distant, without urgency. She thrust her arm under the pillow.
She was nearly asleep when she realized what the sound had been—the scrape of a key being removed from a lock—and the knowledge woke her completely, although she did not move from her hitherto utterly relaxed position. She was inclined to think that she had imagined or dreamt the sound, especially since it was unaccompanied by the closing of the door or the creak of footsteps. Her cowardly panic in the library stacks recurred to her and she grimaced, embarrassed, but even as she reassured herself, she could not help listening. And the door to the hallway was open. And she was only wearing a T-shirt. She closed her eyes, which seemed pasted open, and lay very still, waiting for the next hour or two to pass.
Sometime while she was waiting, the next sound came, an even smaller sound, the movement of the door in its frame, arrested. That was the frightening thing about it, the human thing about it, that the swing of the door had been arrested. Alice’s eyes popped open and she eased herself over onto her back with the smoothness and silence of a seal in water.
There could not be anyone in the apartment. It was too bizarre. After thirty-one years of safety, of there never being anyone there no matter how strongly she feared or believed that there was, that there should be now was literally unbelievable, and she could not make herself believe it. The clearest, and the most tempting, course of action was not to act, but to go back to sleep. She was not one of those people who feared sleep. She loved sleep. In sleep she was safe, warm, possessed only by dreams, and her dreams were always innocuous. And if there was someone in the apartment, wouldn’t they be more likely to hurt her if she was threateningly awake than if she was peacefully asleep? And if they did hurt, or even kill her, did she want to know about it beforehand? Any action, even the small action of putting her foot on the floor, seemed dangerous, ghastly, and impossible, as if the noise she had possibly heard indicated writhing snakes on the floor, not a human presence. Her bed, as long as she stayed meekly in it, would serve as a raft to float her through whatever was going on. She heard the creak of a step and then another step. She made herself release her fingers from the side of the mattress and put them limply on her stomach. She made herself feign deep, relaxed breathing. She was determined not to give away the fact that she knew anything was going on. After all, who could hurt a defenseless sleeper, eyes closed, mouth open, the quintessence of vulnerability? There was another step. Whoever was stepping was doing so slowly, carefully, with full knowledge of the old floor and its tendency to sound. The forty-four-foot hallway. The stepper would be just passing the kitchen now. Alice’s pupils had adjusted, so that the room where she lay was completely visible to her, but the hallway was without light. For a moment she stared helplessly at the doorway, dreading that some monster face would appear there, something inhuman, with snout and fangs and only a single, central eye. She lay there enthralled by the imaged horror of that shock, wishing, as she had in the stacks, to close her eyes and cover her head, wondering if she would ever be able to move, and not really caring.
That the stepper was Jeff Johnson was obvious after she made herself think it. Ray, of course, had known for sure that he had a key, but had hesitated to tell her, and contented himself with a suggestion. There were two more steps. Alice took a deep silent breath, feeling her paralysis drain away as she imagined more and more vividly Jeff Johnson, with his oddly affectless air of being eight years old, but also human and familiar, sneaking down her forty-four-foot hallway in the middle of the night. With an enormous effort, she slipped one foot out onto the floor, slid between the sheets, then put the other foot on the floor. The rustling of skin against cotton and of ball in socket sounded so loud to her that she couldn’t tell if she was making noise or not. She paused, tempted again to forget it and go back to bed. There was another step. Jeff would be almost to the dining room by now. The most important thing was to get her underpants on. She could see them hanging with her shorts over the chair across the room, but to get there, she would have to cross the doorway, would have, possibly, to expose herself to Jeff Johnson’s gaze, and Jeff Johnson’s knowledge of her knowledge.
What did he want? That was the most frightening thing about him. Since he seemed to feel and want nothing, he might feel and want anything. As a child, she had never understood cartoons about the cruelty of little boys to animals—the tying of cans or firecrackers to the tails of cats, for instance. Thinking of Jeff Johnson lying on the couch, his feet up on the sill, she understood them. His primary interest in all things would be to see what would happen. But it seemed absolutely true that she could do nothing without her underpants. There was another step. The steps were very slow. You couldn’t tell, though, how big they were. Alice took one giant step toward her underpants, grabbed them, and swung herself as silently as possible back toward the bed. She put on the filmy and incandescent bikinis, then cast her eyes around for a weapon. Jeff, of course, would have something, maybe even a gun. Ray’s beating showed that he wasn’t afraid of injury being done. All Alice could see was a yardstick. She could not imagine a yardstick doing anyone harm. She looked out the window at the light rising from the streetlamps. The window! The open, screenless, barless window! She crept to it and peered out. It was impossible. She was better off in bed. The drop was straight. No balcony or third floor roof miraculously appeared. The fire escape was around the corner, outside the other bedroom. Only a little granite ledge, about four inches wide and a foot above the window sill offered any possibility of escape, and it was not a possibility that Alice considered realistic. Across the street, Henry’s windows were open and dark, but Alice dared not shout, dared not, actually, even turn around for fear that she would encounter Jeff’s juvenile stare, watching her escape.
Alice crouched on the window sill, grabbing the casement, and then slowly, looking up so that she wouldn’t fall, brought her foot around and placed it on the four-inch ledge. The ball of her foot and her toes were firmly there, but nothin
g else. She turned her foot so that it paralleled the wall and slowly straightened, inching her hand up the casement and letting her other foot come out and join the first foot. With her free hand, she felt above her head for another ledge or some sort of ornament. There was another ledge. She grasped it, let go of the casement, grabbed the ledge with the hand that had just held the casement, and began to straighten her body, pulling herself up with her fingers. With both feet on the lower ledge and both hands gripping the higher one, which ran about forehead level, she felt almost secure. She took a deep breath, but not one that expanded her too much or threw her center of gravity away from the wall. Then she began to creep away from the window. The brick was old, pitted, rough, and scraped her knees and thighs. That she was there astonished her. She seemed to have done it magically, without volition.
Although when she was inside, she had imagined herself safe once she got out, now that she was out, she could only envision Jeff making an instinctive beeline to the window and espying her, lifting a gun—tensing her toes like a ballerina Alice crept toward the corner of the building. There would be the ledge of the bathroom window to hold on to, at least. Other than that, she had somehow to creep what looked like fifteen or sixteen feet along the ledge, and then, somehow, to go around the corner of the building, and creep another ten or twelve feet to the fire escape, where Jeff could be waiting for her, or where she could escape, perhaps, run to Henry or Honey or somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. She tried to get comfortable, turning her feet carefully, one by one, first with the toes apart, then with the toes pointing the same direction, but she couldn’t get her heels onto the narrow ledge. She imagined Jeff entering the bedroom, seeing the disturbed but empty bed and stood on her toes to sidle toward the bathroom window. The ledge under her fingers was covered with grit and pigeon feces, endangering her grip, but she discovered that she could brush the ledge off a little as she moved. Although she could not force out of her mind the image of Jeff at the window looking at her, watching out for him was impossible. Alice did not even dare to turn her head. If the shot was going to come, it would have to come unexpectedly. Alice closed her eyes, trying not to think of what a shot would do to her. Even a flesh wound, maybe even the sound of the shot, could startle her enough to make her fall. Four floors. She closed her eyes again until the urge to look down had faded. She slid her left foot carefully along the ledge, then her right foot. The roughness of the brick snagged her T-shirt, startled her, let her go. She dared not lose her balance, because there was no way to compensate. Friction, the greatest surface of her skin against the greatest surface of the wall, was her only hope. She slid her left foot again, then her hand, brushing off the ledge, careful of her grip, took another breath, slid her right hand, then her right foot. The high, small window of the bathroom was almost within reach—too low, something she would have to duck carefully below, but something to hold on to. There were no shots, no exclamations, no noises from inside the apartment. Alice grabbed tightly to the sill of the window and bent her knees. In a long moment she had ducked under, at least ducked her eyes under. It was impossible to know if Jeff had seen her fingers or the top of her head, was even now standing in the bathroom, contemplating the miraculous appearance of his quarry just when he had despaired. Alice stood up and breathed deeply two or three times. With her right hand on the casement of the bathroom window, she had about three feet to the corner. Whether she would be able to turn the corner was one question. Her calves were beginning to tremble, although not yet to hurt. And the ledges were another question. She could not remember if the ledges even went around the corner. She stretched out the fingers of her left hand, trying to feel around the corner, but she wasn’t close enough. And then, even if she got around the corner, and the ledges were there, perhaps Jeff would be there, too, waiting shockingly on the fire escape for Alice to inch right into his arms. Alice’s heart began to pound so hard that it seemed to beat the skin of her chest against the brick. It was odd the way what she feared to see panicked her more thoroughly than anything else. She inched her left foot toward the corner, then her left hand, took a breath, then closed up with the right. The safety of the bathroom window sill seemed distant already. She reached carefully around the corner. And where was Jeff, now? Down on the street, frustrated, on the verge of looking up and seeing Alice in her luminous underpants, the bull’s-eye of a huge target, bigger than the broad side of a bam, how good was Jeff’s aim, what sort of practice had he had, what sort of weapon did he carry? Around the corner the ledge continued, at least the ledge for her hands. She inched toward it, the image of Jeff down on the street looking up at her warring with the image of Jeff squatting on the fire escape, waiting for her. It seemed impossible both to go on and not to go on. Insanely, she wanted to lie down and go to sleep. At the corner, on the very verge of the turn, she looked back. At least he was not looking out the window.