Duplicate Keys Read Free

she found them annoying, however, and regretted having come. In addition, she was afraid of having to describe what she had seen and of having to listen to the disgust of the others. Really, it was a burden to have to drag herself out of the bathtub, hunt for a cab, and endure an evening going over it all, but she hadn’t been able to keep herself from doing it. It was important to know something, perhaps only that it had really happened.
    “Have you called Susan?” said Rya. “I can’t think of Susan.”
    “She’s in the Adirondacks, remember?” Alice’s voice, unused since her conversation with Detective Honey, came out thick and quavering. She cleared her throat. She longed for Ray to return so that they could have the business of eating. Noah resumed rolling joints—tight, uniform, pointed like nails at each end. Alice sipped her drink. Rya’s gaze wandered upward, and then, underneath the smoked but revealing mirror, she rearranged her legs to better advantage and plumped her hair. There was no music. Listening to music was distressing to Ray, who heard every wrong note and mechanical waver in pitch. He preferred tosave his ears for working hours, he said. Time off meant silence, silence so perfect that it was almost sexual. Sex-u-al. Sex, Ray maintained, was his only other interest besides perfect pitch. When he started talking like that, Alice was irked, knowing it was a pose, for Ray loved to build things and always had some project going, but in the last year or so his friends had changed. Now he went on rather tediously about his passion for sex, pure sex, no complications. Rya stood up as if the mirror were the gaze of God and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind herself. Noah glanced up and said, “How do you think she’s reacting?”
    “What?”
    “Do you think she’s reacting oddly?”
    “Rya? No.”
    “Hmp.”
    Unable to interpret this, Alice said, “Do you?”
    Noah shrugged. Alice often wondered why after nearly four years of marriage the Masts still talked as if the interest of their friends in every wrinkle of their relationship was a foregone conclusion. He called out, “Sweetie?”
    “Out in a flash!” came from behind the bathroom door. Ray liked the bathroom off the living room, but in the silence Alice found herself listening for the flush of the toilet, the rush of water. Noah, his head cocked, was listening, too, but then caught himself and said, “I can’t ever gauge the depths, you know. I think I’m basically sort of a cold person, but she really feels it in her soul.” Alice had her doubts. He put one of the joints to his lips and struck a friction match under the desktop. In a moment he gestured with the joint toward Alice, who shook her head. She usually shook her head and then felt rather drab with the Masts. They also always made her reconsider her clothes. The calico skirt and cotton blouse that had seemed perky and brave when she left her apartment seemed dowdy and bland under Ray’s mirror, in the same room with Rya’s shorts, across from Noah’s little grid of reefers. The key turned in the lock and the door flew open. It was Ray with a huge bag of food. In a moment Rya appeared,shooting straight for it, then moaning over the mo-shu pork, the oysters with straw mushrooms, the gong-bao chicken with charred red peppers and cashews, the sizzling rice soup, the shrimp toast. It must have cost Ray twenty-five or thirty dollars. And there were shao-mai dumplings at the bottom. Rya reached into the bag, her red fingernails promising to impale rather than to grasp one of the delicate hors d’oeuvres. Alice stood up. She was hungry, too.
    She wondered if the others were thinking constantly of Denny and Craig and Susan, as she was. Of course, they had not seen the bodies there, luminously without life, without even the life of the chairs and tables and rugs, not to mention the growing plants and the lamps and appliances coursing with electricity. But then,