In Casa Grande, a town of fifty thousand souls, Jane found a restaurant with a good wine list. She drank two glasses of cabernet sauvignon and ate filet mignon. She was confident in her Elizabeth Bennet look, and she felt safe.
The three-star motor inn offered cable TV, in which she had no interest, and Sirius Radio. She tuned to a classical-music channel. The pianist Glenn Gould. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
She mixed a vodka-and-Coke and sat in an armchair with three objects at hand. The cameo Travis had given her for good luck. The wedding band she could no longer wear in public. The wallet-size photograph of Miriam Riggowitz, whom Bernie had lost a year earlier.
Gould’s brilliant music spoke of both joy and suffering, approaching the heart through the mind, braiding a listener’s intellect and emotions, until those aspects of human experience, often at odds, were united and healed.
As the music transported Jane, she was captivated by the photo of Miriam, reading that clear and gentle face as if it were a novel, imagining stories in it that she could never know were true. Her fascination puzzled her until she understood that it was the Miriams of the world for whom she lived now, for whom she might die: people who lived full lives with little interest in fame or the ideologies that enfrenzied the self-described elites. Over the centuries, the Miriams and the Bernies and the millions like them were the fonts of free and civil societies, which was why the likes of D. J. Michael so despised them and yearned to oppress them; freedom and civility were barriers to absolute power and to the adoration that the powerful could command of others.
She did not want another vodka. She undressed, went to bed, turned out the lamp. With her pistol under the pillow on which her husband would never rest his head, she lay in the dark and in the thrall of music. Maybe she was a woman born in the wrong era, for whom some period of the past had been intended, a woman out of time in more than one sense. In sleep, time did not exist to harry her; there was no hour of reckoning to dread, for once no child in peril.