Cornrows’s earlier tip proves on the mark—the jury is staying at the Econo Lodge across the interstate from Silver Springs, a lagoon-blue lake braided in jungle vines, where the first Tarzan movies were filmed. The Econo Lodge sits on the treeless side of the eight-lane interstate, a two-story stucco building with a fiberglass pool. The hotel’s bright orange sign with its whirlpool design and twinkling star is reminiscent of a Tide detergent box.
The jurors are the only guests.
After telling them that breakfast will be served in the lobby at seven a.m., the Indian woman who commandeers the front desk assigns each juror a room, but doesn’t hand out key cards.
C-2’s assigned room is on the second floor, between the open-air landing with the noisy ice machine and F-17’s room. Below her is the church lady, who tells C-2 she is a light sleeper and asks her not to wear shoes when in her room. Cornrows has scored the only one-bedroom suite, which the alternate insinuates is cronyism because her boyfriend’s sister cleans here.
The deputy cuts him off. “Your rooms have been prepared according to the court’s mandate. You will not be allowed to lock your doors from the inside. The chains and bolts have been removed. The cable and wifi have been disabled, but the TVs have DVD players, and movies are available at the front desk. Questions?”
“Do we get maid service?” asks the church lady.
“When do we leave for Outback?” asks the alternate.
“Must we go?” asks C-2.
She, the chemical engineer, and F-17 opt for takeout.
The room has two twin beds, a patterned rug to hide stains, one reading lamp, blackout curtains, and a surprisingly clean bathroom. The view is of passing semis. Her husband would never deign to stay in places like this, but when C-2 travels alone, she secretly likes these undistinguished stopovers, though she always packs her own sheets.
She instinctively picks up the remote to test the TV and is met with the promised nothingness.
C-2 has brought two novels for company, though lately she is more inclined to read nonfiction—history, science, biography. She chose novels because she has read that fiction enhances compassion and she suspects she will need all the mercy she can muster for the Romanian orphan. One of the novels is a thick thriller her husband recommended and the other is a new translation of Madame Bovary, which she has meant to reread for years.
She kicks off her shoes, stretches out on the bed nearest the air conditioner, and flicks on the reading lamp. A haze of cold LED slopes onto the pillow. She weighs both novels literally, one in each hand, but neither appeals. After hearing the story of the immolation of Caleb, the thriller’s hair-raisers will seem too tame, and Madame Bovary’s adultery too silly.
She wanders over to the window. In addition to the passing semis, her room looks over the rectangular pool, which is long enough to have a deep end and a shallow end. The pool is set back from the highway, in a grassy area shielded by pines. Four chaise lounges, two occupied by feral cats, share the tiny concrete deck. A cyclone fence tall enough to meet safety regulations and choked in kudzu is the only landscaping.
F-17 has remembered his bathing suit. He is swimming laps, diagonally so as to achieve the longest stretch before he has to turn. C-2 is a swimmer herself, though she didn’t think to pack a suit. F-17 does a solid flip against the shallow-end corner and begins his crawl and kick. No unnecessary splashing. She approves of his stroke.
She slips into shorts and crosses the parking lot to the pool. At least she can dip her feet in. Besides, she wants F-17’s medical opinion of the defendant’s rapid, persistent blinking.
He is reclining on a chaise lounge, eyes shut against the low sun. He hasn’t bothered to towel off and the water beads on his chest, the skin startlingly smooth in contrast to his pitted face. He looks younger than forty-two, the age he gave during the voir dire. His hair is a black that doesn’t cast red in the sun. If he let it grow, he would have ringlets. But he keeps it short enough that each strand only has one chance to complete a circle, the kind of Platonic ideal you find in the ringlets on the marble bust of a Roman general.
Her shadow causes him to open his eyes.
“May I ask you something?” she says. She does not recline on the adjacent chaise, but sits on its unstable edge. “What causes rapid eye blinking?”
“How rapid?” he asks.
“Sixty-eight times a minute.”
“Are you asking me as an anatomist or as a juror?”
“It’s a medical question.”
“Rapid blinking blocks vision. You basically close your eyelids so there’s less information coming into the brain.”
“I read somewhere it was a sign of lying,” she says.
“Actually, people blink more when they daydream than when they lie.”
It is still bright and sunny at seven when her takeout arrives—an Outback salad and a baked potato. She eats in her room, on the spare bed. There is no chair. One Styrofoam container is hot, the other cold. She opens the baked potato first so she can eat it while it still holds an atom of heat. Then she rips open the clear bag containing the plastic utensils and one stingy napkin. Concentrating on each forkful, she slowly chews the potato’s flesh. Whenever she eats alone these days, she uses the opportunity to practice eating alone after her husband is dead, when she will be eating alone for real. His mother lived to ninety-six, but that doesn’t mean he will.
C-2 has come to accept that the last ten years of a life are as transformative as the first ten. But how do you know when the countdown begins? Her husband has always emitted excess heat, now he is constantly cold. Is that number ten of the countdown? Or did the countdown begin last year when he had the pacemaker put in?
Her potato is cold.
She wants out of this motel room.
Now.
She heads to the lobby to pick out one of the approved DVDs for the evening. F-17 is already there, choosing among three approved VHS cassettes. He holds them up for her opinion—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dora the Explorer, and Amadeus, the story of Salieri, a mediocre court composer, and his murderous envy of Mozart. C-2 saw both the play and the movie. The promise of Mozart’s music is irresistible.
“Are we allowed to watch a movie together?” she asks the night deputy, a fully made-up state-fair beauty queen with a badge.
“Sorry. You can’t be alone together, and I have to stay here,” she says in an unexpectedly husky voice.
F-17 offers C-2 the videocassette.
“My room only has a DVD player,” she says.
Once again, C-2 stretches out on the twin bed nearest the air conditioner and listens to Mozart through the gypsum wall, which masks nothing. She can practically distinguish the instruments. When the music stops and the muffled dialogue begins, she goes outside into the humid night air. The outdoor walkway that connects the second-story rooms smells faintly of ammonia and mold. Next to the open stairwell, under a cold spotlight, in a funnel of moths, the ice machine hums. She leans against the iron railing. She can see the front office from here. The deputy is gone. She doesn’t appear to be in the parking lot, either. The music starts up again, The Magic Flute. She knocks on F-17’s door. He is barefoot in an unbuttoned shirt and jeans. He doesn’t seem all that surprised to see her.
His room has a queen-size bed.
“May I come in?” she asks.
“We could be thrown off the jury,” he says, closing the door behind her.
“I need music,” she says.
“Do you want me to start the movie over?”
“No,” she says.
There is no chair in his room, either. She sits on the edge of the mattress.
“You comfortable?” he asks, lying down.
“Fine,” she says.
“Here. I’ll sit up and you can lie down,” he says.
“I’m being ridiculous.” She reclines beside him. Then, to her surprise, she adds, “It’s not like we can lock the door.”
C-2 can’t concentrate on Salieri’s jealousy of Mozart any more than she could on Jack Reacher’s fisticuffs or Emma Bovary’s vexation at the way her husband slurps soup.
She didn’t come to F-17’s room for the music alone. She is curious to see if their flirtation can withstand the harrowing stories they were told this afternoon. A flirtation would make the sequestered nights more interesting.
His hands are folded behind his head—she can see his palmaris muscle. His ankles are crossed. He has beautiful feet.
She would like one last dalliance before she gets too old. She’s done the math. If her husband lives another ten years, his mother’s life-span, she will be sixty-two—young for a widow, but old for a dalliance.
She is fairly certain that he isn’t watching the movie either. But fairly isn’t certain. What if she is delusional—or, worse, pathetic?
She closes her eyes. There is only music now, and a palpable awareness of his body next to hers. Don Giovanni is playing. The saddest opera, and the saddest song in the saddest opera is sung by Death.
She rolls over and kisses him.
After a surprised hesitation, he kisses her back. His kiss is lengthy, compelling, carnal and ethereal at once, and she is ashamed of how badly she needed it.
She pulls back, slowly, and opens her eyes. The lights are on. The bedspread is orange and purple. The walls have heel marks. The ceiling is cottage cheese. A band of static cuts across Salieri’s face on the screen. She is once again a fifty-two-year-old woman watching a movie with a fellow juror at an Econo Lodge.
“I’m sorry, this is a mistake,” she says, but she knows she doesn’t sound sorry. She sounds flirtatious, which isn’t her intention. The heady aftermath of the kiss has changed her voice into something she doesn’t recognize.
“Sorry for what?” he asks.
“You need to ask?”
“We are two private citizens doing public service. Our nights are our own.”
“Unless we invite the deputy in to observe us, our nights are not our own,” she says.
He holds her wrist before she can get up, then lets go.
“Thank you,” he says.
“What for?” she says.
“You need to ask?”
He goes downstairs to return the video and distract the deputy, while she slips back into her room. It’s still twilight, not yet nine o’clock. She brought a three weeks’ supply of Ambien, as per the judge’s instructions. She takes one.
Supine, eyes shut, knowing drugged sleep will soon arrive, she allows herself to remember the kiss, but the music, which is playing jarringly loud inside her skull, keeps distracting. Don Giovanni.
The first time she heard the opera was in middle school. Miss Foxx, her music appreciation teacher, had assigned the class to listen to the classical radio station that evening and take notes about how the music made them feel. “Try for the sublime,” Miss Foxx had instructed C-2 and her eleven-year-old classmates, the sons and daughters of casino workers, for whom the only sublime was a jackpot. In Las Vegas, where C-2 lived with her mother in a subdivision with more sand than grass, the assignment was as close to a field trip as the school provided.
C-2 and her mother had owned a cassette player and a TV, but not a radio, except in the car. After dinner, C-2 sat in the garage behind the wheel of her mother’s VW Beetle, and tuned the radio to the local classical station. Her mother had started the engine and left the car in park so that C-2 wouldn’t run down the battery.
At first C-2 felt stupid writing down her feelings about classical music. Without a snappy beat, the music seemed pointless.
On the far side of the Beetle’s windshield, she could see her secondhand bike with its flat tire that her mother never got around to fixing, and the paint cans left over from the time she and her mother had painted her bedroom purple, a favorite color C-2 soon came to hate, and the empty pizza box from dinner sticking out of the trash can. She shut her eyes against all this ugliness, and without warning, there was only music. Blind, she was no longer bored by the music. It made her want to cry.
The garage door opened and her mother had come charging toward her, screaming her name. “What was I thinking?” she told C-2. “You could have died from the fumes.”
C-2 has always wondered if what she experienced in that garage—the sublime, as Miss Foxx named it—resulted from the music or the carbon monoxide. But what stayed with her, what shaped her nature, was that she now knew that the sublime existed and she was just as entitled to it as the girls who had radios in their pretty bedrooms.
It was only a kiss.