Duplicate Keys (33 page)

“Oh.”

“I took it off.”

“I see. How much is a new one?”

“A good one? The kind I have on my door? Fifteen bucks. Not much when you look at it. Okay, now this is what I’m going to do.” He rummaged for a moment through his tool box. “I’m going to put this kind of new lock in your door, up above the other one. I’ll leave that one there. That plus a new chain, ninety bucks. It’s a pretty fair lock, not the French job, but all brass, penetration proof, all that shit. Good lock for the money, fine for this neighborhood.” Alice calculated the tax and the tip, then nodded. He started to appraise the door and she went back into the kitchen, where she added another line of information to her note. CityWide Locksmiths 545-9922. She turned on the flame under the kettle and sat down where she could appear to be minding her own business, but actually watch Don. He was rummaging through his tool box again. When he leaned over, his two workshirts, one a ragged plaid and one blue, separated from his pants and exposed his pale but hirsute lower back. Certainly there had been a time when she would have greeted someone of his appearance with a sigh of relief, assuming without a second thought that he could be trusted. Now she would have preferred an older man, the father of six or eight kids, in neat blue overalls with his name stitched in a nice oval over the front pocket, someone who had lived in Astoria for thirty years. Don Dorfmann rummaged once again through his tool box, this time with annoyance, and said, “That asshole!”

“What?” said Alice.

“Ah, this asshole that works one of the other trucks, he’s always borrowing my tools. You don’t have a needlenose pliers around the house, do you?”

Alice longed to be able to say yes, but she shook her head. He rummaged again, found a long nail, and began to poke at the door. After a moment, he threw down the nail. “Fucker!” he exclaimed. “You got a phone?”

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

A
FTER
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, perplexed, then kicked it angrily down the hallway, exclaiming, “Well, it never did me any good, anyway!”

A
LICE
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.