Duplicate Keys (11 page)

“The service was nice,” said Ray.

“Don’t even talk about it,” ordered Susan.

“I want to talk about it,” he began, in his wise mentor manner. “We should talk about it. It’s a horrible thing.”

“We keep having these dinners,” said Susan, “as if they were killed in a car accident or died of pneumonia. We keep embracing
each other, and wiping away each other’s tears and calling each other on the phone and saying, significantly, ‘How
are
you, dear?’” Ray reddened.

“Who did you give the keys to my apartment to?”

Ray twisted a bone out of some meat on his plate and laid it aside. Indignant? Alice wondered. Afraid? Would a trained observer, like Honey, draw a conclusion or only leap to one? Ray said, “That’s a valid question for you to ask and I’m trying to think. I sent one of the kids from Studio Midtown up there a few weeks ago to pick up Noah’s bass, but he gave me the key back that day. Zimmerman had the key for a few days last week. I was negligent there, I admit. That’s all I can think of. But didn’t Alice say something about the locks being changed?” Ray opened the clip of his key ring and put two keys on the table.

“Who else might you have loaned them to?” Susan picked up the keys.

“Like I said. Nobody.”

“Well, what were you doing that night? Where were you at zero hour?”

Ray was casual. “With some friends.”

“You don’t think any of your other circle of friends might try to force himself on someone in our circle, do you?”

Delicately, Ray allowed, “You could say there’s been contact. Hardly more than that.”

“So you were with your friends.”

“With one friend, yes.”

“Who?”

“You don’t know him, I believe. Honey talked to him.”

“I’ll bet,” said Susan.

“What are you saying?” Noah tried to speak judiciously.

“You always leave your keys lying around, don’t you, Noah? Once you even lost the whole bunch and Denny gave you a brand-new set to our apartment.”

“I used to keep a lot of stuff there.”

“Didn’t everyone?”

“Any band—”

“So, who’s had access to your keys?”

Noah shrugged. “No one, I don’t think.”

“But you don’t know! Very careless! People get hurt!”

“If you—”

“Anyway, you were there that night, weren’t you?”

“Where?”

“At my apartment, the night Denny and Craig ‘got killed,’ as it were.”

“Of course not.” Noah met her gaze.

“Well, where were you?”

“I was at home. I answered all these questions from Honey, Susan.”

“With Rya?”

“Rya didn’t get home till late that night.”

“By yourself? No one there to swear to your presence?”

“Well, where were you?” His voice came out too loud, and diners at the table behind him turned slightly and leaned over their plates. “Where were you? Alone in the woods?”

Susan smiled and shrugged.

Alice piped up. “Where was I? I was asleep in my bed. None of us has an ironclad alibi, if that’s what you’re looking for. Most people don’t three-fourths of the time. So what does this prove? Susan, I think—”

Susan poured herself another glass of wine. “I know you were in bed. I know you had nothing to do with it.”

“How do you know? You can’t know.”

“You’re drunk, anyway,” said Ray.

“Fuck you,” said Susan. With an exchange of significant glances around the table, Ray, Noah, and Rya all stood up in unison, laid down their napkins, and turned from the table. Susan said, “Don’t bother to finish!” Alice saw Ray step up to the captain. She speared Noah’s last medallion of veal and lifted it onto her own plate. Susan was panting. The diners at the tables around them were resolutely attending to their own business. Alice’s head began to
throb. “Hey,” she said. “What’s going on? They’re our oldest friends!”

“Sometimes I don’t think you understand what’s happened.”

“I admit it’s rather hard to take in.” She raised a bite of veal to her lips, paused to inhale the aroma, then put it on her tongue. Lemon, pepper, parsley, the tender, milky flesh, a velvety sauce mysteriously seasoned. Susan said, “You act as if things haven’t changed, as if nothing has taken place. Where do you think Denny and Craig are? How do you think they got there? Our group of friends isn’t just going to roll supportively along, patting and kissing and eating together.”

“All kinds of people had those keys! Honey seems to think—Well, you can’t tell me that Ray or Noah or Rya—”

“That’s what Denny always wanted, too. Lots of patting and kissing and holding hands. Nestled in the bosom of the family. Craig on one side, me on the other, everybody embracing.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“What do you know?”

“I know that I can’t stand this. I think I’d better leave, too.”

“I bet you think I don’t cry enough. I bet you think I’m wonderfully brave. That’s what Denny’s mother said I was. My mother, too. Those exact words. Did I want her to come and I was wonderfully brave. I bet you think that after all these years together, I’m not reacting to Denny’s death quite right, that I’m a real bitch to recognize that my apartment’s a good deal even after this.”

“In New York, any apartment—”

“I bet you think there’s something wrong with me, you can’t quite put your finger on it. I’m doing all the proper things, but, well, you don’t want to say it. Even think it. You’re a very loyal person. I bet you’re remembering how you could hardly walk or talk after Jim left you, couldn’t even write your name. Remember how you called me on the phone the night you got the letter, and you said that you were trying to write back, but your hand didn’t work, and the pen wouldn’t work, and you couldn’t write his name or your own, or even simple words like ‘is’ and ‘chair’?”

“I haven’t thought anything about it.”

“You know what my mother did when my father died? She bought a new living-room suite! You better believe that shocked the neighbors. It even shocked me. The day after the funeral she went out and got a sectional sofa, a glass-topped table made of a redwood burl, a La-Z-Boy Chair, new drapes, and a music center.” It shocked Alice, too, although she didn’t want it to. “Then she hired a trash hauler and took all the old stuff, my father’s chair and his record player and everything down to the Salvation Army and dropped it off.”

“Maybe that was the only way she had to be desperate.”

“Maybe.”

“Let’s go.”

“I haven’t had dessert. I want crêpes Suzette.”

“Let’s have something on the way.”

“I want crêpes Suzette!”

“Okay, sweetie.” Suddenly what Alice wanted was to put her head down on the beige tablecloth, or to lie down on the toast-colored banquette. How was she going to deal with this? The restaurant was very warm. She felt trapped and terrified of leaving at the same time. She could hardly hold her head upright. Weakly, she said, “Why did you send our friends away?”

“We don’t know anything about friends,” said Susan, beckoning the waiter.

5

S
USAN
wanted to sleep in her own apartment that night, and Alice did not try to dissuade her. They parted at West End, exchanging tentative and promissory kisses on the cheek. The late dusk was still pale and shot with rose. Alice tried to take solace in it as she walked uptown, to smile at passers-by who smiled at her, to mention the weather to the occasional doorman who mentioned the weather to her. What she yearned to do upon reaching her place was to call Jim Ellis and to cry and cry and cry, to beg for his help, to plead that he leave Mariana, to insist on a return to three years before. Even while rolling these desires through her mind, she recognized them as her habitual response to trouble. Of all the things his departure had done to her, wasn’t that one of the worst? Opening her door, setting down her bag, taking off her jacket, she let herself plan out what she could say, what her tone could be (easy but serious), how much need she could show (fatigue, strained loyalty). She unplugged the kitchen telephone resolutely, but then not so resolutely went into her spare room and found her copies of his poems, both old and new, in his hand and Xeroxed from journals in the library. This was
one of her most craven habits, that made her feel worse, not better. She turned on the light as the dusk thickened and opened the folder. “Chinese Chestnuts” lay on the top, about a year old. In it he likened his love for Mariana to one of those spiked chestnut cases, the very thought of which made Alice’s palms prickle as she read. It was of course with her, in Doreen and Hugh’s fruitful backyard, that Jim had first gathered chestnuts and pricked himself on the hulls. He probably didn’t gather chestnuts in California, having never cared for agricultural endeavor. By the end of the poem—“the satiny sweet lodged within—” the phone rang. Thinking at once that it might be Susan, a different, sober Susan, who did not suspect their friends, Alice went into the bedroom and picked it up. It was Henry Mullet.

“What are you doing?” he said.

Annoyed, Alice replied, “Reading poems my ex-husband wrote to his second wife.”

“Sounds self-destructive. How about a movie instead?”

“Not tonight.”

“What are you going to start on after the poems, old letters?”

“I thought of it.”

“I think you’d better put on your sweater, put your keys in your pocket, and meet me on the sidewalk.”

“Not tonight.”

“It’s a beautiful evening.”

“That’s not so rare any more. Look, I feel really bad. I’ve got a headache—”

“Am I being too forward?”

“I don’t know. I’ve had a bad day. I’ve had too much to eat and drink and think about already this evening.”

“So who’s going to eat or drink or think. Hang up the phone, take your keys, come downstairs. You’ll be back with your ex-husband and his wife by nine-thirty.”

“Please, I—All right.”

When she got down to the street he was waiting for her. Without speaking, he put his arms around her and hugged her tightly.
Once again he smelled wonderful, this time of laundry detergent and clean warm skin. After a few seconds, she reached around him and returned the pressure. When he seemed about to release her, she broke away and said, “Yes, that was very forward. What now?”

“I’d still like to go to the movies.”

“It’s too late for me.”

“Work, etcetera?”

“You bet.”

“But what will you do if you go back in there? You won’t go to bed.”

“Probably not.” The apartment did seem an arid cell when she thought about it. “Let’s walk around the block,” she said, “and smell those trees on Riverside.”

“The silverbells.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Carolina silverbells,
Halesia Carolina
and so forth.”

“That’s right, you’re a botanist.”

“And you are a librarian.”

“Not your glamor careers.”

“Definitely on the side of preservation rather than creation.”

“Do you consider yourself dull?” she eyed him.

“No, do you?”

“Not yet. I wonder, though.”

“I spent three years in Taiwan and six months in Japan.”

“Maybe I have a monopoly on dullness, then.”

“That’s when I thought I was getting dull, actually. Abroad is duller than home in a lot of ways, even a place like Japan, which is often perfect, especially for a botanist. I couldn’t wait to move to Manhattan. Champagne and satin, you know.”

“I’ve heard. I usually think in terms of Rheingold and wool.”

“Twenty-One? Elaine’s? Zabar’s? Lutèce?”

“You know Elaine, too? She’s only been at the reference desk for about a month.”

“I’d stand in line for her.”

“In
line?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Minnesota. That’s why you hugged me rather than mugged me, I suppose.”

“Maybe.” After a moment, he said, “How long since this presumed husband?”

“Presumptuous is more the word. Two years.”

“And you’re still reading his poems?”

“He’s still writing them. Actually, they’re beginning to get good.” She thought of telling him about the one in
The New Yorker
over the winter, but didn’t. Henry said, “Two years ago I had just gotten to Japan from Taiwan. I thought it would never end.”

“Two years ago I thought it would never end, either. Did you come back any while you were away?”

“Not once.”

“Amazing.”

“I thought so, too. Do you want to go around again?”

Alice took a deep breath of the refreshing air. “Yes. I forgot to smell the trees.”

“This time we won’t talk. We’ll just smell, like dogs.” Halfway around he bumped her and then took her arm above the elbow. When they got back to her doorway, he said, “Did you smell anything good?”

“Lots of things. I couldn’t distinguish the odors, though. Surprisingly few bad things, even this close to the river. I think it’s always strange how good mere inhalation makes you feel.”

“Would you go inhale with me out in Brooklyn on Saturday?”

“What time?”

Not until she had turned to go did he relinquish her elbow.

I
N THE
morning, when they were dropping off the boxes at UPS, Alice wondered why, although she had been with Susan for nearly an hour, and on fairly good terms, she hadn’t mentioned, or even thought to mention, her walk with Henry Mullet.
A botanist would interest Susan. If she met Henry, Susan would have something intelligent to say to him. She wouldn’t have to ask questions simply to dredge up something to talk about. Oriental plants or Japanese gardening would be something she had read about not too long ago. Still, just as she could not bring herself to tell her parents about Denny and Craig, she could not bring herself to tell Susan about Henry Mullet. The boxes, neatly addressed, rolled down a conveyor belt out of sight and Susan heaved a large sigh. “Want to eat?”