Duplicate Keys (21 page)

By four-thirty, her eyes had run over so many books and names and numbers, her fingers had separated so many bindings and pages nearly fused, that she was hardly thinking or feeling anything any more. She idly deplored this disintegration of materials, and said to herself all the clichés about what the library needed. She counted the names on her list and estimated how much of tomorrow her search would use up. She saw, as she turned out the light after herself, a flash of fabric, the heel of a shoe disappearing around one of the white metal bookstacks. It startled her, the presence of another person, no doubt one of the clerks, in someplace so obscure. Although if you thought about it, no place in this cataloguing system could be any obscurer than any other place, since at least the oldest books were arranged according to size and date of acquisition rather than according to subject or author. Alice could not help pausing and catching her breath, listening for the retreat of footsteps. There were no sounds. She walked down the aisle toward the stairs to the floor below. She could not help looking back twice. No lights went on. No one appeared.

On the floor below, she passed a knot of clerks and nodded. Her goal was the far dark end of the dark row of stacks. She would not hesitate, nor would she turn on any lights but the lights above her destined stacks. Not in front of the clerks. But it was strange how nervous she felt, how uneven her breathing. When she came to the book she wanted, she put her hand on it, and then, almost involuntarily, she paused for a long time, staring at the brown binding, absolutely still, making no noise, hearing no noise. She shook herself and then disinterred the book from its place on the shelf. It was 4:45. She would find no more before meeting Susan.

She thought of herself telling Susan, “I’m so paranoid lately! I thought someone was following me in the stacks!” She imagined herself laughing merrily at the very thought, Susan laughing too. She thought of Susan on Sunday, opening Alice’s bedroom door with the suddenness of—of what? The only thing that came to her mind was the suddenness of a car wreck. Suzy Soderberg. Car wrecks were on her mind. One last book. It was down another floor. When she stepped off the stairs, she saw that the whole floor was dark. The clerks would have turned off the lights, as there were no evening hours tonight. Alice quailed, but then made herself head down the aisle, turning on only every third light. The book, the last of this particular author, was as far from the steps as it could possibly be. But close to the elevator! But she had to turn off the lights! But the only footsteps she heard were her own. She walked deliberately, thinking of being late for Susan. But she could park. The book was not in its place. She considered. Check-out highly unlikely. Wrongly shelved? She read off the titles of the books above and below, left and right, but she was listening so hard that they made no sense to her. She stopped herself, closed her eyes, read them again. Now it was impossible not to pant, not to think of scary movies in which men came up behind and coshed you over the head, not to think of bullets ricocheting in the stacks, pinging on shelves, sinking into bindings and pages (and who was that clerk, Karen something, who’d been shot at from Bryant Park while she was sitting doing her
work on the fourth floor or the fifth floor? The bullet came through the window and went through her hair), and then of larger disasters—flames shooting up through floors, engulfing seven stories of old paper in minutes, seconds, less time than it would take her to get to the stairs. Did she hear footsteps? There was a definite sound, step, step, step. Alice nearly passed out, but the sound receded and then stopped. She came out from behind her stack and looked down the aisle. All of the lights she had turned on had been switched off.

She still had not found her book. She made herself read titles. She longed for the elevator. She nearly groaned. Someone could be coming up behind her. She whipped around. No one. Nothing. They wouldn’t find her for years, maybe. She inched over to the end of the stack and turned out the light. Now the floor was entirely dark. She couldn’t see, but neither could anyone else. Alice crouched beside the stack, protected, and stared down the long dark aisle. There was no sound, and only the movement of dust gathering. Alice waited.

A
ND
then, oddly, she came to her senses, or rather her brimming fear drained away, leaving her sheepishly squatting in the bookstacks in the dark, late for her rendezvous. She stood up, shook her hair into place, smoothed her skirt and turned on the light. It was two minutes past five. She would have thought it midnight, or five in the morning. She took a few deep breaths, and exhaled them vigorously, as if thereby blowing out the last weightless but clogging motes of what had possessed her. What had possessed her? Riding up in the elevator she considered the previous few days and it seemed to her that they were comprised of uncontrollable angers, desires, and fears, threaded together like beads on a string of uncontrollable hunger. When she wasn’t thinking about Henry, or wasn’t angry at something or fearful, she was contemplating her next meal. At night, she planned breakfast. When she ate with someone else, she wanted what
they had as well as her own. When she and Susan conversed, if they didn’t reminisce or reconsider the murder, they discussed food. The elevator stopped at the ground floor, its tinny doors creaked open, and Alice stepped out. Even the main floor reading room was about deserted. As always it struck Alice as too grand for those who studied there, too grand for term papers on Sarah Orne Jewett and Nathan Hale, too grand for anything human. As she looked at it now it seemed so alien as to be almost funny. For what cause could those eleven men, was it, have possibly died, and wasn’t there one still buried in the walls? Not for the great work of preserving books, since as an edifice of book preservation, the library was not ideal. For the greater glory of Lennox, Astor, and Tilden, then? She let herself out of the librarians’ station between the reading rooms and glanced up at the spot where men had come once to scrub up the gold leaf of the vault, a vast and dangerous undertaking that trustees in the modem era had rejected as not cost effective. The experimental spot still glowed.

Susan was waiting for her. Even as she pulled open the car door, she was apologizing for being late, explaining that she had been in the stacks. Even as she was getting in, Susan was saying she had just gotten there, had thought she was the one who was late, why she had gotten the car out today in the first place, she couldn’t imagine, except that she’d had sort of an urge to drive it. Alice sighed deeply and pleasurably with the relief of ending another workday. Susan turned to back out of her parking spot. It was good to see Susan after all, good not to go home on the bus. “What shall we eat?” Alice said. “And what percentage of the time would you say I talk about food?” Susan stomped on the brake as a motorcycle appeared immediately to her left. “Shit,” said Susan. “I’ll never get out of here.” Alice said nothing about her panic in the stacks.

I
N THE
end they chose to put the car away and have done with it, then to make an omelet or something, with a spinach salad and a loaf of French bread from Zabar’s. Susan was in a good mood. While Alice sat at the table, worn out and therefore, she thought, unusually distant, Susan washed and drained the spinach three times, cut up onions and mushrooms for the omelet, mashed cloves of garlic into half a stick of butter for the French bread. She worked energetically but effortlessly, more interested in what she was talking about, which was Denny, than in what she was doing. Alice thought of other dinner-making conversations they had had, in which the dinner maker always took the lead and the table setter always listened, providing an occasional hum of agreement and encouragement, the price of not helping. Usually such times were special pleasures. Susan was saying, “I think something’s been resolved somehow, although I don’t know exactly what, or how. I do miss Denny terribly, and I think about him all the time. I mean, I cry at the store and have to go into the back. But I’m more convinced that there’s somewhere to get, and that somehow I’m getting there. Do you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.” Alice glanced out the window, hoping for a sudden and miraculous look at Henry Mullet. She was hardly her loyal self, was oddly removed from Susan and the familiar enchantment with her conversation. She thought again and again of her panic in the stacks, and it seemed almost as frightening as a real attack would have been. Fear had paralyzed her, rendered her incapable of thought as well as action. Her only instinct had been to crouch, to cover her head. It was intolerable to anticipate a life whose dangers were immeasurably amplified by such a reaction. But the thought, once thought, slipped away. She was worn out.

“If I knew what I meant, I could tell you, maybe, but I don’t. That’s the weirdest thing about it. Something about our life was annoying me.” She glanced up quickly. “It had nothing to do with anything I was supposed to be feeling. It was like some little barb
that kept hooking me. Every time I thought of Denny, or Craig, or all of us together, it hooked me and sank into me, and made me mad and hurt me at the same time. Do you know what I mean?”

“In a way.”

“Now I know what the hook is, which doesn’t get rid of it, but at least I can see it, whereas before it was invisible. Now I can see that it was a part of things, but then it seemed to infect them, like poison ivy. Everything seemed impossible, the way it does when you have poison ivy all over your body, but now it doesn’t. I mean in retrospect. I suppose it’s odd that just understanding it should have such an effect on me, since the whole situation is changed now, but it’s such a relief to know that something was a certain way and not a certain other way.”

“What are you talking about?” Alice sounded rather sharp, but Susan didn’t seem to notice.

“What did Craig give you this year for Christmas?”

“Don’t you remember? That Halston blouse.”

“I remember. And he gave me an ounce of Joy perfume.”

“So what?”

“Remember where he said he got the money?”

“They had all those gigs between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that guy in Bridgeport gave each one a hundred-dollar tip, that drunk guy.”

“They did have all those gigs, but Craig spent that money on drugs. Denny told me after Christmas that the weekend before Christmas he ‘loaned’ Craig a thousand dollars from our joint account, to pay off a debt that was about to get him in real trouble. I didn’t dare ask what the trouble was, but I don’t think it was drugs. Except that the debt was only partly paid, because Craig had the money in his pocket on Christmas Eve, and he was in midtown, and you know the rest.”

“Jesus.”

“Now, that doesn’t make me mad any more.” Susan threw the vegetables into the bubbling butter. “Really it doesn’t. We gave
him three hundred more, and he paid it off. We used to fight about it, though. We lent a lot of money to Craig, and last night, just as an experiment, I sat down and figured it up, only cash, subtracting all the money he lent us or paid back. It came to fifty-seven hundred dollars. Hand me those eggs, will you?” Alice got up and carried the bowl of lemon-colored eggs over to the stove. “I looked at that figure for a long time. It seems like a lot of money, doesn’t it? But we knew him for thirteen years, and that’s only just over four hundred a year, or, say, eight-fifty a week. Cigarette money, beer money. And that’s where it would have gone if we hadn’t lent it to him. Shall I try to flip this?” Still Susan sounded cheerful. Alice had never seen her speak of Craig with such equanimity. “Yes, I like it cooked all through.”

There was a pause while Susan slid the omelet to the front of the pan, then eased it over. “Beautiful,” said Alice.

“I’d thought I was burning up about that money all these years, but when I added it all up and really looked at the figures, I realized I didn’t care.”

“Well, it did symbolize your rivalry with Craig. I mean, Denny was giving something of yours to him—”

“No, I thought about that, too.” She slipped a table knife through the steaming fold of egg, then separated the two halves. She bent down and took the bread from the oven. Alice reached across the table for the salad, wanting to shake her head furiously to clear it, to fasten her attention with screws or nails to what Susan was saying. Perhaps panic had a chemical effect on the brain, some dissolving of cortical tissue. Susan pulled out her chair and sat down.

“Denny wasn’t blindly uncritical of Craig, you know. And he wasn’t without a temper, even though nobody saw it except me. About six months after we met, something happened that I should have paid attention to. The three of us were eating dinner. No, there were four. Craig was seeing that Chinese girl whose father was with the embassy, remember her?”

“Helen Huang.”

“Right. So the four of us were eating dinner. Craig had the only car, then, and he asked me if I needed it for anything the next day. I thought for a minute, and he asked me again. I opened my mouth to say something, and he asked me again, this time sort of barking. Denny wasn’t paying attention, but Helen looked up at me. I think I even managed to say ‘I’ or something, but Craig interrupted me and said, ‘Well, shit, Susan, do you want the fucking car or not? If you do, then this time you can put some fucking gas in it.’ I must have inhaled sharply or something, because Denny, who was sitting beside me, looked up and said in a warning voice, ‘Susan!’ This whole time I’d had my fork in my hand, ready to start eating, and I just turned the fork in my fist and I stabbed Denny right in the arm. It drew blood. I wanted it to draw blood. Well, we jumped up and we screamed at each other and ran into the bedroom and cried, and it was all very dramatic, and Helen, who was raised in a very traditional Chinese family, was floored. At the time it seemed very passionate and exciting, and I cried, though not as much as Denny, and mostly because it felt good to be sort of swept away, you know. I bandaged his arm, and we had this melodramatic reconciliation, and all the ferment seemed to be between Denny and me. But it wasn’t. I should have paid attention to that.”