It was, and it was thanks to Peggy, but Peggy wasn’t here. She was in Manhattan, where her apartment was, dining out, going to nightclubs, living her glamorous life among the other heiresses and jet-setters and all the rest of the people to whom money meant nothing. She wouldn’t be here till the weekend or maybe the weekend after that, Tim wasn’t sure. And Tim wasn’t one to worry over it either—if Peggy didn’t show up, someone else would. That was the way he operated, the ultimate bachelor, but his attachments and flirtations and his magnetism for women were all a cover for the guilt he felt over the suicide of his first wife—that much was as plain as day. And you didn’t have to be a psychologist to see it either.

The way she heard it, from Ken and Fanchon both and what Fitz was able to piece together, Tim, no surprise, had been anything but monogamous when he’d been at Berkeley, drifting away from his first wife—Marianne—to be with the woman he was then having an affair with (and who would ultimately become his second wife, but that marriage didn’t last either). It all came to a head on the eve of his thirty-fifth birthday, when he and Marianne came back from a party, drunk, and the other woman showed up at the house. There was a fight. The other woman left. And Tim and Marianne, drinking still, drinking more, passed out in bed together. When Tim woke the next morning, Marianne was gone. Sometime in the night she’d got up and baked him a cake for his birthday, which she’d left in the middle of the kitchen table before going out to the garage, starting up the car and letting it run till the fumes asphyxiated her. Ken said that in the moment of discovery, when Tim, panicked, flung open the garage door, both Suzie and Jackie—eight and six at the time—had seen their mother lying there across the front seat of the car in her nightie, as if she were sleeping out, as if she were having fun, but that detail was too much to hold on to and Joanie let go of it. She had to. It would have crushed her to believe it. Would have crushed anybody, of course it would, and what had it done to Tim?

When she looked up, he was at the stereo, his back to her. There was the static of the needle dropping, and then something soothing was playing through the speakers, something that wasn’t the Beatles, that wasn’t jazz, or not any jazz she’d ever heard—it was piano music, simple and unadorned, and it felt as if each note were a separate slow pulse matching itself to her own.

“What is this?” she asked. “I love it.”

“That’s Satie,” Alice said. “Isn’t it?”