Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online Page B

Eighty-fourth Street, at the happy bustle of New Yorkers in shirt sleeves and backless dresses heading for Riverside Park and a walk in the sun, or for Broadway and a little harmless buying. Across the street and down a ways, an older woman in a bonnet was bedding plants in the three-foot strip of earth in front of her brownstone, and three floors above her another woman, in a bathrobe, was leaning far out of her apartment window, also bedding plants, in a window box, something flame colored, perhaps geraniums. At that height and facing south, she would have the sun for them. It was thought in the neighborhood that the brownstone one up from the corner of Riverside had a large roof garden. At least, trucks with huge redwood troughs had pulled up one day, and another day men had carried giant bags of soil and gravel and composted manure into the building. Alice did not think with envy of the fresh spinach and perfect tomatoes those roof gardeners undoubtedly enjoyed. After all, set like brooches along the sweep of Broadway were vegetable markets that presented to any city dweller with a few dollars the pick of East Coast crops. What she envied, and what she would have paid for those countless home deliveries to have, was the vista of sun-drenched green under the bell of heaven, and the silver plume of the river waving in the distance. On Eighty-ninth Street, some top floor resident had erected a solar collector that Alice felt proud and proprietary about, as, she suspected, did everyone who knew it.
    That made her think of Ray Reschley’s father, who, Ray said,was building a pair of windmills, one on top of the house and the other on top of the garage. He had gotten rid of the second car and filled half the garage with batteries to store the excess power. Average wind speed in Rochester, said Ray, was 12.8 miles per hour. Ray was a tinkerer, too, and as long as Alice had known him, he had been refining some project. Now he talked about selling his apartment and finding himself a top floor place. Average wind speed on the West Side was nearly ten miles per hour. He could find himself something with three bedrooms and have plenty of space to store the batteries. Alice wondered if he had the money for it, and then she wondered how much money he had. In that sense, Ray had obviously done better than any of them, no Hamlet, but a technical Horatio whom Craig, the very image of a Hamlet-to-be, had convinced to drop out of optometrist school. Now one of the most dependable sound men in New York, Ray earned more outfitting studios and working for record companies than any number of handsome guitar players. So what if his life was a confusing round of sexual passion and frustration, no domestic homosexual bliss but repeated cravings for men who didn’t crave him. In a world of beauties, Ray, with his pink skin, pointed fingers, tiny feet, and swelling middle, was not even pretty. For the past year or eighteen months, he had found himself a new crowd, or so he said. Unlike most peer groups, this one carried knives, razor blades, even guns. Ray did not introduce them to any of his old friends, and Alice didn’t often think of them. Once, angry, Craig had called them Ray’s “imaginary playmates.” Craig, in fact, had teased Ray a lot over the years, even after Ray’s work for him had become a kind of noblesse oblige. Alice thought of Ray’s remark that he had loved Denny and “even Craig, most of the time.” He probably did.
    They had all known each other for so long! Julie Zimansky had first whispered to her that this guy Ray Reschley kept calling her up all the time almost sixteen years before. Two years after that, Susan had lived down the corridor from Alice her first semester in college, and Christmas of that year, Susan had introduced herto Denny and his adopted brother, Craig. During her junior year, she had met Jim Ellis on her own, but he rapidly joined the group, and that summer the band had formed, stretching to