Duplicate Keys (16 page)

“What’s happened to Ray? Let’s go upstairs.”

“Nothing new. Except that Honey says he may have been seen in Miami, at the airport. He asked me if I knew if Ray had friends in Miami.”

“Was he all right? Was he with anyone?”

“He was all right, if it was Ray, and they couldn’t tell if he was with anyone.”

“Miami!”

“Maybe it wasn’t him.” Noah stepped off the elevator and un-snapped the pocket of his shirt. He twirled the joint absently between his fingers as she unlocked her door, and lit up as soon as they got into the apartment. Alice handed him an ashtray. Alice had always liked to look at Noah, who was tall and thin, with dark thick hair and regular features. His mouth, especially, was straight and perfectly shaped, like that of some founding father known for absolute integrity. She had never felt, though, that she was his particular friend, as she had with every other member of their group, even Rya. There was something either reserved or simply boring about Noah. He perhaps felt the same way about her. She understood that he was a good, even excellent bass player, with a tenacious hold on the beat. In astrological days, Craig had sometimes called him a “closet Taurus.” Alice had wondered more than once whether drugs had destroyed his mind. He was older than the rest of them, and even twelve years ago, at twenty-three, Noah smoked marijuana the way some people smoked cigarettes. “You want some juice, Noah?”

A seed popped at the end of his joint. “I’m not that worried any more about him. Ray’s pretty good at taking care of himself.”

“Noah, you know that’s not true. Remember that guy who beat him up a couple of years ago, then came back two weeks later and Ray actually let him in his apartment and he had a knife and he took something, what was it, Ray’s tape deck?”

“That’s so.”

“I’m more worried that they found him in Miami. I wish they’d found him in Toronto or London. Someplace English.”

“They may have seen him.
May.”

“Okay.”

“Why don’t you call Susan and tell her you’re safe and sound?”

When she came back from the phone, Noah had stretched on the couch and put his booted feet up on the window sill. Alice set a glass of orange juice in front of him. In the ashtray was a large roach. Looking at him, Alice could not help imagining Henry Mullet, who had kissed her for five minutes before getting on his train. Noah’s conjugality, which had always seemed rather funny to Alice, assumed new interest. She visualized Noah animated with desire as Henry had been not twelve hours before. Even as he sat there, he gained depth. “Actually, I should tell you that I—” It was out before she knew it, but as Noah’s head turned toward her, she chose not to go on. What if nothing came of Henry? There would be time to bring him up later. “You’re speaking to Susan then?”

“I was never not speaking to her. That dinner was just a bad scene. I don’t blame her or anything. Rya was hurt, but you know Rya.”

Alice nodded. “I’ve been wondering how you guys were feeling.”

“It’s hard, man. Nobody said it wouldn’t be. And Rya was pretty close to Shellady.”

Alice made a circle of orange juice on the table with her finger. “Not closer than you were, Noah?”

“Lately, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe lately.” He seemed uneasy.

“Noah—”

He surprised Alice by looking at her expectantly, almost eagerly. Alice realized that he may not have had anyone to talk to all week. She grew frightened, then with her bad sense of timing, waited too long. Noah turned back to the window. At last, she said, “Noah, was there something between Rya and Craig?”

He opened his mouth and closed it, continued to look out the window. Alice’s thought returned to Henry Mullet like a wave to the ocean. “Yeah,” said Noah.

“I can’t believe it.”

Noah shrugged.

“How long?”

Noah sat up and picked up his orange juice, looked at it, then chugged it down. “Too long,” he said.

“Didn’t it drive you crazy?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you do anything about it?”

“I did. I tried, anyway.”

“What happened?”

“Remember that old Jefferson Airplane song, ‘Triad’? ‘Why don’t we go on as three?’” He hummed a few notes. Alice nodded. He shrugged.

“It must have been very painful for you.”

“It wasn’t, in a way. They were very affectionate.”

“Oh, Noah.”

“Shellady had this theory. He said that he and Rya would have to go through a kind of breaking-in period, that when you were new with somebody, you couldn’t avoid that.” Alice nodded in vehement agreement, then looked at her watch, wondering if Henry had gotten to Brooklyn yet. She glanced out the window. It was a beautiful day for it. She imagined him excited at the gate. “He figured that after that period was over, then we could go on as three, in fact we would have to, since none of us would be able to do without the other two.”

“Did you believe that?”

“I couldn’t do without Rya, that’s for sure.”

“Noah, I’m really shocked.”

“Maybe not without Shellady, either. I thought of finding myself another gig, maybe something on the Coast. I even called Dale Nolan. Remember him? There wasn’t much. Anyway,” he paused. “It scared me to move.” He said this shamefaced, as if,
Alice thought, a real man would have moved. “Shit,” he said. “I loved the guy. You loved the guy, too. How could Rya not? How could she? That’s the thing that’s kept me here. It was all completely inevitable. I think about Shellady and he seems like this bright light to me. Sooner or later the moth has got to give in.”

“That’s not true! We didn’t orbit him! He wasn’t the sun!”

“Do you think?” Noah let his head drop on the back of the couch. He sighed. Alice’s hands were trembling.

7

A
LICE
hated her responses to things. Always amazed and respectful, she never managed to find anything out, or even to see what had to be found out. After Noah left, Alice stood in the shower regretting over and over that she hadn’t picked up on one of their exchanges: “Why didn’t you do anything about it?” and “I did” or “I tried.” (So unobservant was she that she couldn’t even remember his exact words.) It would have been perfectly natural to ask, What did you do, when did you do it? Wouldn’t Honey have asked that? Wouldn’t Honey have secured dates and times, details about Noah’s present relationship with Rya, alibis for the evening and the night of May 9?

Honey intrigued Alice the Citizen. He could perceive the murderer in everyone, she thought, whereas she was only able to instantly sympathize. He was trained to make judgments, while judgments were the last thing she could make. As soon as anyone spoke, she saw his point of view, and it was hard for her to rate points of view or to decide between them. She was a liberal who voted in Democratic primaries, addressed envelopes, and even canvassed from time to time, but she had come to suspect that
a vital body politic couldn’t really stand such tolerance as hers, widespread. She wondered what Henry was doing. The door of her bedroom opened. It was Susan, who said, “Yoohoo! Didn’t you hear me shout?”

Alice, momentarily transfixed by surprise, shook herself and smiled. “I was in the shower. I hate this paranoia! Noah just jumped all over me about being out of touch last night, and every time the door opens or a curtain moves, my heart starts pounding.”

“Yours!”

“You probably want to pass out!” Alice kissed her friend on the cheek, and Susan sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry I didn’t call last night. I was coming out of the store and there was the theater showing
Breaking Away
and
Manhattan
and I couldn’t resist. I thought of calling you. I’m sorry. And I really didn’t realize that the phones were still unplugged when I got home. I was just beat.”

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Well, actually,” Alice dropped a dress over her head and bit her lip. “I went out to the Botanic Garden in Brooklyn.” She smiled.

“I thought you were going to come over to the shop. I looked for you all day.”

“Did you? When you didn’t say anything about it, I just assumed you’d forgotten and I figured you were busy….” She let her voice fade, but Susan didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry.” But even while regretting her own clumsiness for the millionth time, Alice felt resentful. To have not spent those hours with Henry? She beat it back, beating back as well the reflexive confession of where she had been, how she had found a new “interest.” It would be a good topic of conversation—what he was like, how he was dressed, what he did for a living, how old he was and how experienced. “Hungry?” Alice said, heading for the kitchen. “I’m starved.”

“No,” replied Susan, an expression of perfect reserve that erased
Alice’s own reserve. Instantly Alice wanted to press upon her friend the bagels with all the cream cheese, two grapefruit halves and whatever else she could find—a hard-boiled egg, a banana, a sugar cookie, the jar of artichoke hearts. Susan sipped at a cup of tea and talked coolly about work. Yes she had set up her displays, the clothes were nice, but drab colors, lots of khaki, and even more expensive than the owners had expected. Nubbly cotton sweaters for a hundred dollars, thin white balloon pants for eighty-five. Jeanne, the new salesgirl, hadn’t shown up again, they’d caught a fifteen-year-old trying to leave with a French T-shirt under her blouse. Alice said, “These grapefruit are very sweet” and “The cream cheese is Zabar’s best,” lifting her bagel alluringly.

Although she turned down everything, Susan smiled and said, “Remember that time I took you to Denny’s parents’ house?”

“His mother made pie for breakfast.”

“And one of those nights for dinner there were five plates of chicken on the table, one at each corner and one in the middle.”

“And the bowl for gravy was a mixing bowl.”

“And there were two mixing bowls full of mashed potatoes.”

“Tell me about it,” exclaimed Alice. “I mashed them myself with a potato masher.”

“Mrs. Minehart has never operated what you might call ‘une cuisine,’” laughed Susan, “but there was a whole cabinet set aside for candy and cookies. Do you think it wrecked him?”

“Wrecked whom?”

“Denny.”

“How could it have wrecked him?”

Susan tilted back in her chair. “It was so much fun. It was endless fun. I don’t think I ever heard about all the things they did, those kids. One year after school, Denny had a job stuffing sausage. I think he must have been only about seven or eight. He’d stuff with this hand crank sausage stuffer for an hour and a half or two after school, and then on Friday he’d take home a great big circle of sausage for dinner. He was such a little bread-winner!
And in the summer he fished and took home bass and things for dinner. He was very proud. I knew him for all those years and he never stopped coming up with stories about little things he had done when he was growing up. He was good at telling them, too. I used to think that I made it bad for him, because before he met me, he just sort of accepted his childhood, but I was so amazed and excited by it all that after a while he began to see it as strange, as a sort of golden age. He was much more delighted by it later on than he was when I met him.”

“It was interesting. You couldn’t help your response. You wouldn’t have wanted to, either, would you? You’ve got to be yourself.”

“But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you’re mad at them for being a certain way, it’s actually you who’s making them be that way.”

“But if you tried to separate that tangle every hour of the day, you’d go crazy, and what’s worse, everything you did would be self-conscious and false.”

After a moment, Susan said, “I don’t think Denny thought it was ever as interesting since as it was before.”

“Since what? Before what?”

“Since we got together.”

“Oh, nonsense.” Alice stood up and began vehemently clearing away, in order to express her dismissal of this proposition.

“I’m not blaming myself. I know how you hate for me to blame myself. That’s just a convenient watershed. I suppose I’m saying that if I had had his childhood, I would have thought that everything since was an anti-climax.”

“Noah was here for about forty-five minutes this morning. I realized it was the first time I’d ever really talked to him. Isn’t that funny? We’ve known each other for twelve—”

“I think Denny had a dream childhood, the last Tom Sawyer boyhood in the history of America.”

“Let’s go outside. It’s another nice day.”

“Why are you so determined to change the subject?”

“You sound like you’re talking out of depression—”

Susan shook her head. “Alice, my dear, you amaze me. How should I talk? What should my voice be coming out of? How should I be seeing everything? You always wait until you think well of something or someone and then you label that the truth.”

Stung by both the justice of this remark and by the glimpse of Susan observing and drawing conclusions about her, Alice did not reply. She remembered Henry Mullet. She hadn’t slept much the previous night. Tears smarted beneath her eyelids. Susan went on, “What has Denny had for the last five years? A job with no future, a rented apartment, some nice clothes. Big deal.”