Duplicate Keys (17 page)

“A job that he loved, a lover that he adored, an apartment in New York City, and money to spend as he pleased.”

“So you say.”

“So
he
said. And he didn’t think his job had no future. He had lots of hopes.”

Susan grimaced. “You know that his father used to make him do farm work in the winter with no gloves because he didn’t want his oldest boy ever to like farming? He wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer or a college professor. He never held that against his father. He never held anything against anyone. Not even Craig.”

Not wanting to, Alice exclaimed, “He didn’t have to hold anything against Craig, you did that for him!”

Susan shrugged, reached into her bag, and took out a pack of cigarettes.

“I didn’t realize you were smoking again.”

Susan didn’t reply.

“Don’t smoke! Eat! I’ll go buy you ten pounds of chocolate. You were inhuman when you were giving up smoking.”

“You know, I loved smoking in Minneapolis. I loved to go with Denny to the gigs and sit at a table near the front, and watch him and drink beer and smoke. I’d buy a pack of Camels and get a
new book of matches, and put them on the table right in front of me, like a magazine or something. Friends would come over and sit down and leave, Denny and Craig would sit down between sets, the waitress would keep topping off my glass, and I would sit there appreciating Denny and
smoking
. That was the key activity. I was secure in the knowledge that at the end of the evening, Denny would get paid, pack up, and then take me home and fuck my brains out. When you had a pack of cigarettes in your hand, you really had something weighty and full.”

“You were so determined to give it up.”

“Why did we move to Chicago? Why did we move to New York? Time began to push us. Every time a new group came out with a big record, Craig would figure out their average age.”

“We grew up.”

Susan smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. No one had any kids.”

“Can you imagine?” Alice meant, telling a five-year-old about
this
.

“No one ever did. Don’t you think that’s peculiar?”

“What?”

“You and Jim were married for almost five years. How come you never had any kids? Or even thought about it, as far as I knew.”

“Kids in New York—”

“Come on. There’re kids all over New York.”

“Yes, but think of the awful lives they lead. Mom has to go with you everywhere till you’re about fifteen. You’re officially indoors, which means behind three locked barriers, or outdoors, which means in some dusty park with five hundred other kids. There’s none of that easy drifting through the house, leaving the refrigerator open and banging the screen door that we had. If we’d lived elsewhere, I think we’d have—”

“Really?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“You got to be twenty-seven, and you never thought about it?”

“What room was there for kids? There was always Jim Jim Jim. Can you imagine him modifying his life for kids? Not going out every other night? Getting up at six? Eating hot dogs for dinner? Once when we were at his parents’ house, his cousin came over with her baby, and somehow it got on Jim’s lap. He didn’t hold it at all, and pretty soon, it started to slide off. He didn’t even realize it. Finally, Jim’s mother jumped up and grabbed it before it fell to the floor. I mean, he didn’t have bad intentions, but he didn’t even realize it!”

“What about you? Didn’t you ever lust after a baby?”

“I lusted after Jim! What was left over to lust after a baby?”

“Well, doesn’t all of this seem weird to you? The patterns of our lives formed twelve years ago! And they didn’t basically change until
now!”

“We were happy!”

Susan’s eyebrows lifted.

“Well, at least we were going to be happy. I always thought that things with Jim would get smooth and comfortable sometime. When he was around, I felt exposed to something, either danger or embarrassment, every minute, but I knew that would pass, and then we’d do other things.”

“Yes, and I always thought that someday Craig would leave, or at least learn to live his own life, and then we’d do other things. Well, let’s do something. Aren’t you tired of hanging around?”

And something about the way she set her teacup in the saucer and lifted her eyelids reminded Alice that she was with Susan. With Susan! No one was like Susan, after all, no one thought about things as Susan did. Some quality of her mind was unique, attractive but indefinable, inaccessible. Always Alice came around to this sense of something beyond reach, or even comprehension, in her friend. Repeatedly, she had failed to name it: femininity, reserve, integrity, even selfishness, self-reliance, security, but it was larger and more mysterious than any of these, and was something Alice could not help wanting to possess. It was a great talent, this trick of arousing perennial curiosity. Alice put her
arm affectionately around Susan’s waist and said, “Let’s go out to the Statue of Liberty. We’ve never once been there.”

A
S IT
turned out, they ended up merely in midtown, window shopping. Starting at Bergdorf’s, they strolled down Fifth Avenue, looking at store windows. There were high-heeled sandals in alligator-patterned leather, a narrow strap with a tiny gold buckle to set off the bone and tendon of a slender ankle. Chocolates shaped like flowers, spilling from gold boxes. Tablecloths scattered with embroidered violets and appliquéd roses. Cuffed cotton shorts and crisp shirts bearing vivid palm leaves and the faces of tigers and monkeys. Hardbound books with jackets as bizarre and hip as the pictures on record albums. Tight white skirts slit up the front or the back. “I don’t think we’re with it any more,” laughed Susan. They examined their hair and faces in the glittering clean windows.

“I went off to college with a whole new wardrobe,” said Alice. “Six square wool dresses with short sleeves, one of which was purple with green vertical bands—”

“I remember that one.”

“Two pair of hip-hugging woolen slacks, one gold and one red white and blue plaid, with those funny belts that were longer around the bottom edge than they were around the top edge—”

“Ugh.”

“Wait, get this, and a sleeveless wool sweater, also gold, with something in green and blue embroidered in wool across the top. Sleeveless! Hip length—”

“Just long enough to cover the belt.”

“Yards of beads.”

“I had those apple seeds strung on a string. I could wind them around my neck six times and still get them off over my head. I thought they were the choicest jewels I’d ever seen.”

“I was very envious of those. You definitely had more style than the rest of us.”

“My favorite period was the Indian cotton period. Calf length.”

“Tights and Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals.”

“A huge wool sweater.”

“With the lanolin still in it, and preferably with little bits of straw and sheep shit to prove it was wool. And hair as long as the bottom edge of the sweater.”

“Your hair was beautiful long.”

“Peacoat in the winter, with the sweater hanging out beneath.”

“That was a good period for you.” Alice smiled to think of Susan’s hair parted by a pencil line down the center of her head, then brushed smooth and looped over her ears, lifted and twisted once and pinned to her head with a single long silver barrette. Or braided as thick as three fingers down her back.

“Your best period was forties dresses from antique clothing stores.”

“Mmmm.” Alice nodded. “I still have the sneaking suspicion that those dresses are the hippest of all, that they do so much for your figure they transcend the tides of fashion.”

“Dream on.”

“Groovy.” Alice put her arm through Susan’s and stepped off the curb of Fifty-fourth Street. In a moment they stopped to gaze at a tray of glistening preserved fruit: peaches, pineapple, cherries, but also kiwi fruit and sunset-tinted mangoes and lime-colored quinces. Behind them were trays of cakes, mostly varying intensities of chocolate. A sign in the window advertised fifteen varieties of coffee. “Carrot cake is out of fashion, too,” said Susan, with a mock sigh.

“Thank God. And honey bran raisin cupcakes.”

“And mystical morning lightning herbal tea.”

“I loved the clothes but I hated the food.”

“Black beans and rice, pinto beans and rice, garbanzo beans and rice.”

“Don’t forget the water. When you’d finished your beans and rice, there was always a lot of water in the bottom of the bowl. You couldn’t really call it broth.”

“Yummy.”

By now they were laughing. The few passers-by smiled to see them. Alice was amazed at the power of things to raise her spirits so thoroughly, even things she couldn’t afford or didn’t want. “What’s your favorite former fantasy?” she asked.

“Oh, definitely dome-commune-with-radio-station. Don’t you remember that one? It was Ray’s, I think, first, but he and Denny and Craig talked about it for at least a year. Craig was going to get a first-class broadcaster license. Plots of vegetables next to each dome, chickens, cows, kerosene lamps until we got the hydroelectric generator in, all cars left at the edge of the property. I had the horse plan all ready to go. And goats. Craig saw these people in California who lived in a teepee and kept goats, and he nearly had one shipped out.”

“That was a good one. Jim imagined himself getting on a perfectly natural sleep schedule. Whenever it would be dark, he would sleep. He thought you could stockpile it over the winter, and if everything averaged out over the year, you’d be perfectly alert and healthy. We were going to sleep on straw mats and do yoga for an hour before breakfast, which would be entirely fruit, of course.”

“Us, too,” said Susan. “They must have talked.”

“It was a wonderful fantasy. Not my favorite, though.”

“What was that?”

“Overland to Nepal.”

“You even saved money for that, didn’t you?”

“Two or three thousand dollars.”

“That was a lot of money, then.”

“We never could decide between the Land-Rover idea and the donkey idea. Jim thought if you were going to do it, then you had to go to every extreme, otherwise it wouldn’t be a pure experience. He always said that if you thought of something like going by donkey or eating only fruit for breakfast, then you had a moral obligation to do it, because you could lose your soul through compromise.”

“Why didn’t you ever do it?”

“Well, some guys got ambushed in Afghanistan, remember them? Their donkey was named Willy, which was short for Willimakit. One of them was killed. But basically, we just didn’t go, like we just didn’t start the dome commune.” They walked in silence for a few moments, and a surge of grief struck Alice and drained away. When she could speak coolly again, she said, “Honey seemed surprised that we all moved here together. I guess he was never going to start up a dome commune with his best pals.”

“Doesn’t seem the type.”

“Didn’t you love it, really? Didn’t friendship seem like the great immensity that would never be exhausted or used up? There was always someone to talk to, always someone attractive, always someone who had a different perspective on your cantankerous spouse.”

“Always someone whose food you could eat without asking and whose records and books you could take.”

“And whose clothes you could wear.”

“And whose bed you could pass out in.”

“And whom you didn’t have to worry about not touching. Or touching. Don’t you miss it?”

Susan stopped and looked at her, thoughtful. “No, not now. It was fun.” She walked on. “Everyone did seem so unique and interesting. I don’t think that’s true any more.”

“And familiar. Peculiar, interesting, and familiar. I always thought that was what a big family must be like, except that in a big family, you would be stuck with younger brothers and sisters or babies or boring aunts that you had to show respect for.”

“I don’t think my mother ever had a dinner party for six people that she actually was fond of. Whether they were relatives or my father’s business associates or neighbors or whatever, there were never six that she liked, my father liked, and who liked each other all at the same time. I do remember thinking about our potlucks and feeling very superior about that.”

“I thought it would never end. I thought I would never have to eat food with someone I didn’t know intimately.” Alice laughed.

Susan again lifted her eyebrows. “Did we know each other intimately? I once tried to write down everything I knew about Denny, all his qualities and physical characteristics. I didn’t get much beyond a physical description, and even that was pretty general.”

Fifty-first Street. They crossed to the east side of Fifth Avenue in order to meet up casually with the windows of Saks. Alice realized with a start that she hadn’t thought of Henry Mullet in perhaps half an hour. Thinking of him now seemed unaccustomed, alien. For a moment, a trifle embarrassing. She had told him she was going to spend the day coming to her senses. Perhaps she would. Susan drew her attention to a lovely white summer dress, tucked and ruffled and inset with lace, but Alice’s attention slid off the dress and onto Susan, before whom she stood still in absolute love and familiarity. It seemed suddenly true to her that no man would ever do more than kiss her life or her imagination, no man could overcome the quantity of experience she had now accumulated. The labor of explaining everything—not just telling anecdotes, which was rather fun, but explaining strands of thought that stretched over years, habits of perception firmly in place, justifying deeply held views (such discussion bored her even to think about)—seemed as difficult and unrewarding as carrying stones across a stony field. Weren’t marriages contracted in later life always shallower than others, more or less parallel, never convergent? And wouldn’t Susan’s presence always ensure that shallowness, a failure of concentration on the man, perhaps, that would be fatal to a real marriage? No man would ever have more rights over her than Susan did. She could not imagine it. She could imagine Henry kissing her, though. She could see in her mind the drop of his eyes from her face to her moonlit breasts, and experience at once the thud of desire and expectation that his evident desire awakened in her. She closed her eyes. Susan said, “I don’t know if I like the skirt and blouse better or the
dress, but if Saks were open, I know I’d go spend the rent on one or the other,” and the sound of her voice transformed Alice’s memory of her own body into a picture of Susan’s. It was as if she had thought about it before, except that she hadn’t, Susan’s pointed chin, her head bent back, exposing her neck and shoulders, the smoothness of her chest and then the swell of her breasts, which Alice suddenly wanted to kiss and suck. Her stomach, never concave, would flow around her navel like water between the banks of her hipbones. Alice imagined her own hand flowing with it. And then her tongue—