Authors: Jane Smiley
Susan’s eyebrows lifted quizzically. “Who else?”
“What about Noah?”
“Isn’t some unknown dope dealer more plausible? Maybe the convolutions of all our jealousies and anxieties are irrelevant after all. Maybe the answer is just money or revenge.”
“And that’s why you’re pissed at Ray?”
“I guess. Mainly, though, I’m just pissed. Ray, as an idiot, seems as good an object as any. Or I’m not pissed. I don’t know. Are you leading a secret life?”
Alice jumped.
“I called you late last night, after I got home, and no one answered.”
“Well, I was going to—”
“I have a secret. Would you like to know it?”
Alice looked just briefly at her food and at the table next to them, composing herself. Now that the time had come, she wasn’t exactly sure she did want a confession. Unspoken knowledge had more grace, left them each more room for privacy and thought. And such a confidence was legally unwise. There was that to consider. “Of course, but—” Alice looked meaningfully around the room, but actually there was no one within earshot. This was as good a place and time as any. “I feel so odd. Light-headed and jangly.”
“Tell me the truth. How have I seemed to you these last two weeks?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say—”
“Brave, jaunty, a little insensitive?”
“Not exactly—”
“Too analytical, not prostrate enough?”
“I never knew anyone who died before—”
“Died?”
“Certainly not anyone that was murdered.” Alice found herself whispering.
Susan wiped her mouth and gazed at Alice speculatively, for a long time. At last, she said, “Do you feel like you’re made of the same material all the way through?”
“What?”
“Not literally, but spiritually. I don’t. I feel like no matter what I say or what my intentions are, I literally cannot express myself, what is true about myself.”
“Everybody thinks—”
“Do they? You too? You feel this transforming interface, like an electric grid, between yourself and your appearance? It can’t be tricked or turned off and must censor and distort or cancel every communication? Do you really?”
“Well, language is a very clumsy tool—”
“Here’s a fact. Yesterday before I came over, I stood beside my window for a long time. I’m going to tell you I wanted to jump. Did I tell you I wanted to jump?”
“Yes, but—”
“I don’t know for sure that I wanted to jump, because I didn’t jump, of course, but it may be that I wanted to jump.”
“Susan!”
“One time I got out the car and took it up Route 9W, on the other side of the river. There are all sorts of drop-offs and curves over there, but I was afraid of making a mess. Also that it would start to burn. I’m going to tell you that I wanted to get myself into a fatal accident, but that’s not really what I mean, maybe, since I didn’t do it.”
Alice shuddered. “When was that?”
“The day I picked you up at work. But this is what I mean. Inside me there’s one intention. Outside me, there’s another action. The one doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to the other.
Inside, there’s me, feeling a certain way about the murders, and outside, there’s Susan, going to work, cooking, eating, walking, talking, bearing up without any visible strain. Any observer would think it was your boyfriend that got it, not mine.”
Alice took a deep breath, sat back in her chair, and cast her eyes around the restaurant. The darkness of the room disoriented her, and her arms and hands still seemed to be trembling, although when she looked at them, the trembling wasn’t visible. She clasped her fingers together and rested them in her lap. She opened her mouth once or twice in the hopes that something instinctive and helpful would come out, but nothing did. She stared for a moment at a spot of dressing she had spilt on the tablecloth, then looked up at Susan. It was then that she perceived the exact degree of Susan’s independence from any efforts she might make. Erect between the arms of her chair, sinking her fork with precision into her quiche with one hand, the other hand calm in her lap, Susan looked untouchable, clean, as if she had attained a kind of solitary perfection that she had always been aiming for. Alice did not for a moment doubt the depths of her despair, the profound grief, chagrin, remorse, and whatever else that went to make up the aftermath of Susan’s murderous act. She saw, however, that events had had a concentrating effect on her friend, that in some way she was more completely herself than she had ever been. Suicide was a persuasive consequence to such an implosion. She said coaxingly, “Do you want to talk about it? You know you don’t have to.”
Susan looked at her watch in her usual businesslike fashion, then smiled companionably. The realms of mystery in her were suddenly unfathomable to Alice, who smiled companionably back.
“Obviously,” she said, “there’s no satisfactory response. Denny and I had this problem for years. I blamed him, I blamed Craig, I blamed myself, I blamed astrology. There was no conceivable avenue of communication. And it got worse, or else the full extent of the problem gradually unfolded. I don’t know which. There was no way I could express a truth about myself in a way that
he could understand. I could tell by his response, which was usually sweet and well intentioned and always aimed at some spot just beside me or above my head. You’re the same, but different. The problem is in me, obviously.”
“But—,” said Alice. But nothing.
“Now, I am going to try and tell you how I’ve been feeling since the big day. In a way, I’m rather surprised whenever I move and act and breathe, because my body doesn’t seem like a human body any more, it seems like a solid block of granite with an attached skin. No hollows, not even any cracks or fault-lines, you know. That’s why there’s no change. When I was in high school once in Latin class, we had this ex-priest who taught us, and he was more interested, sometimes, in talking about theology than about Cicero or whoever. It was pretty boring, but I remember that he gave us his definition of eternity. He said for us to imagine a block of granite a mile high, a mile long, and a mile wide. Every hundred years a bird would fly by and drag a feather over that block of granite. When the feather wore down the block of granite to nothing, that would be one moment of eternity. Well, it feels like that block of granite is in me, and that the bird hasn’t even come by with the feather the first time.”
“But doesn’t everybody feel more or less like that when someone they love, uh, dies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Susan! Listen to me. Those tacky, time-worn remedies are true. They work. Time does heal all things. Getting it off your chest does make it less monumental. Sharing your burdens does ease them. Escaping the scene of the crime does get it off your mind. This image of a granite block is an idea. It has no reality. You can get help from someone, and someone can succeed in helping you.”
Susan smiled, and even as Alice finished speaking she doubted her own words. She looked away, across the room again, so aware of her own body as a hollow, slippery thing, a confusion of moving surfaces and independent enterprises that when she looked
back, Susan seemed to recede. Friendship after all was a paltry thing, the bumping together of two round objects. She put her elbow on the table and her forehead in her hand.
Susan went on. “If I did kill myself, it wouldn’t be like killing a person.” She smiled again. “It’s hard for me to even think of it as dramatic or significant, and then when I make myself, it’s only from your point of view or the point of view of the store or my mother or something. But that point of view is a hard one to maintain, and also seems wrong somehow. Not morally wrong, mistaken.”
“Now that we’ve talked about it, do you feel any less inclined to do it?”
“No. I told you. There’s no change. You’ve got to try to imagine that. No change.” For the first time during the conversation she looked momentarily distressed, as if permanence were the worst feature of the whole problem. Perhaps it was.
Alice tried again. “But life is change. If you continue to exist, then things will change. This is a fact, a true fact.”
“Maybe. Who’s to say?”
“Everybody. Human experience. Scientific observations of the universe.”
Susan lifted her eyebrows coolly but skeptically, then said, “I want to go home.”
“I hate this.”
“People who are talked to want to make a difference.”
“I love you.”
“I know. I’ve thought about that phrase a lot. It flew around my apartment, I must say, with complete abandon. It never made a difference, never stood up to anything. Usually it meant ‘you owe it to me to do what I say’ or maybe, ‘thanks for doing what I said.’ I couldn’t figure out what love was, or why anyone wanted it, even when I was saying it.”
“Susan! Is there anything else to your secret? You could have just left him!”
Susan’s eyebrows lifted and she shook her head. With a smile, she replied, “We were in love. Let’s go, really.”
They let themselves out onto the bright street, and had to pause for a bit to adjust to the sun and the crowd. Susan took Alice’s arm. “Let’s not go there again. Too dark. It was creepy.”
W
HEN
she got off the phone with the locksmith, who said he would be over as soon as he could make it, the phone rang at once. It was Rya. “I’ve been calling you all morning,” she said irritably. “Where were you?”
“I was out for a walk.”
But Rya really didn’t care. “I’m going crazy here. What’s going on there?”
“Well—”
“Did that woman get Noah out? I’ve tried our apartment twelve times.”
“Noah’s in custody somewhere. I’m not sure where.”
“David promised they would get him out.”
“He might be at Riker’s Island. That’s where they go to await trial.”
“Trial! What’s going on? David said this woman was the best in New York City. That’s what they always say, though.”
“I haven’t been able to see him. Honey’s being cagey, somehow. There’s some kind of evidence.”
“My God.”
“I think you should come home. There’s something else, too. Ray got beat up and left on my doorstep.”
“You’re kidding. Well, I was going to come anyway, because it’s just awful here. I told my brother about Noah being in jail, but I don’t dare tell my parents. My father’s all set for me to move back to Houston. He’s even found me a job at a local TV station. I think they think I’m getting a divorce.”
“I can’t imagine where they got that idea. Look, I don’t know
what’s going on between you and Noah, or what’s in Noah’s mind, but I do think that you’d better be here, and Susan thinks so, too.”
“So he did it, huh?”
“I don’t—”
“That’s very weird.” Rya didn’t sound particularly upset.
“It’s not—”
“I was scared sometimes that Craig would drive him to do something bizarre, but why Denny? He was never mad at Denny. You couldn’t get mad at Denny.”
“Maybe.”
“I even said to Craig once that he didn’t know the effect that he had on people. I couldn’t explain it very well so I’m sure he just ignored everything I said, but he really drove you crazy. You were always doing stuff that he wanted you to do that you didn’t want to do, but he didn’t know that after all you really didn’t want to do it. Once you’d done it, then he went on to the next thing that he wanted you to do, whether it was to pick up the tempo, or whatever, and he never realized that you hadn’t been convinced. I still can’t explain it. It made me want to strangle him more than once, but Denny, I still can’t understand Denny. I guess I don’t understand Noah very well, either.”
“You don’t sound very upset, I must say.”
“Don’t I? It seems far away. It seems like just a thing that happened. This life is unreal. All these girls from my high school have six kids. I can’t explain. What’s going to happen?”
Alice, annoyed, only wanted to get off the phone. “That I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be there tomorrow. Can I stay with you?”
Rudely, Alice said, “If you care enough to come.”
Rya did not take offense, but then she rarely did. She said, “I don’t know if I do, but I suppose I’ll find out in the next few days, huh?”
I
T WAS
seven before the locksmith managed to be there. Alice had a hundred dollars in cash secreted in a drawer and a nervous feeling that had he known where it was, he would steal it without changing her lock. Once she allowed herself to think that, then there was no stopping a flood of other suspicions—primarily variations on the theme of the power and ubiquity of Ray’s “friends.” If some of them were in real estate, then why not others in locks? Who was more likely to have duplicate keys to all the attractive residences in town than a smart locksmith? Or keys to the apartments of unsuspecting women? You had people at your mercy if you had keys to their apartments. Did locksmiths have to be licensed? Could locksmithing be as profitable as systematic stealing? What would keep a locksmith honest besides a moral decision? Was the population as a whole, of which locksmiths would be a fair sample, more honest than not? She was shaking, not with fear, but the peculiarity and excitement of her speculations. What she really wanted to know, what she felt she could not exist without knowing, was whether Ray’s “friends” were a knot of deviants on Christopher Street, or whether they formed a pervasive network that included the locksmith or Detective Honey or even other people—Henry? Henry had appeared awfully suspiciously the very night of the murder, hadn’t he? The buzzer rang and the locksmith announced himself. When he got upstairs, Alice made him tell her his name slowly, so that she could remember. While he was inspecting the door again, she wandered with apparent idleness into the kitchen and wrote it down next to the phone—5/24/80—Don Dorfmann—7 PM. When she came back he had removed the chain, which he held up to her, shaking his head. “Shit, man, I bet you make sure the last thing you do every night is put on this chain, right?” Alice nodded. Don Dorfmann laughed, which made his hair jiggle in one clump. Alice noticed that he had put the back part of it in something of a braid. “What’s wrong with it?” said Alice.
“Nothing, except for the fact that a seventy- or eighty-pound kid could break it, no sweat, in about a minute.”