Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley

Author:Jane Smiley [Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

AND 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.

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