The air-conditioning unit was clattering like an antique fan, and his room was so cold you could store meat in it. The walls were paneled with dark wood. In the dim light cast by an eggplant-shaped lamp on the bureau, the walls looked slick, as if they were coated with many years’ worth of nicotine or were dripping with humidity. The place smelled of mildew and cigarettes. So much for the charm of undercapitalized businesses. Where was the Holiday Inn with its sanitized toilets and its spotless mediocrity when you needed it? Desmond sat on one of the double beds and started to take off his shoes, but looking at the shaggy orange carpeting, he thought better of it. Three nights. For three nights he could put up with anything. He pulled open the orange drapes, and the room was flooded with a burst of sunlight so bright it seemed to gobble up the room’s flaws. There was ocean, the soft, shifting green of the Gulf, rippling in the wind like a field of grass. When you had this outside your door, how could it matter what color the carpet was or how dirty the walls? The white sand, fine quartz blown down from the Appalachians, started at the foamy edge of the water and sprawled—through spiky grass and scrub pines—right up to the back wall of the motel. He pulled the drapes shut. The funny thing about dazzling sun and pretty views was that they made you want to share them with someone else. Better by far to have a dank room that made you want to run away.

He turned the TV on and off, checked out the bathroom, unpacked a suitcase, and made a call to Lorna, confirming their meeting with her tomorrow morning. He pulled down the orange bedspread and jammed four thin pillows under his head and, for the next hour, read through Jane’s lists. The business of biography had taught him that people were always the best sources of information about their own lives, providing you didn’t believe much of what they said about themselves. You had to look for the longing between the lines, look for the person they were trying hard to be, learn how to read the essential lies they told to themselves. If you took Jane’s lists at face value, you’d have to conclude that she was the hardest working wife and mother on the planet. But if you really wanted to know what occupied her mind, you’d have to decode the little check marks that showed up in the corner of certain pages of the appointment book. Poor Thomas, he thought, leafing through the numerous mentions of him scattered across the pages; he was the man Jane so eagerly wanted to love, which wasn’t necessarily the same thing as being the man she did love.